This ring barrow in the townland of Carrigeen, County Limerick, has no confirmed surface expression today. It was never marked on Ordnance Survey historic maps, leaves no trace on modern satellite imagery, and yet there it briefly was, readable from the air in November 1984, caught in a single aerial photograph before the land apparently swallowed it again.

A ring barrow is a low, roughly circular earthen mound surrounded by a ditch and outer bank, typically associated with burial activity in the Bronze Age or Iron Age. They are common enough across Ireland in the abstract, but this one earned its place in the record through an unlikely route. The site was identified by Martin Fitzpatrick during examination of aerial photograph BGE 1:5000 No. 48, taken on 3 November 1984 as part of the survey work associated with the Bórd Gáis Éireann Curraleigh West to Limerick gas pipeline. The infrastructure project, whatever its effects on the landscape, produced a detailed aerial record of the region at that moment in time, and it is from that record alone that this barrow is known. A possible second barrow was noted lying just 15 metres to the southeast, suggesting the site may once have been part of a small funerary grouping, though that companion feature is equally invisible on later imagery. The location itself is wet pasture, 285 metres northwest of the Morningstar River, which at that point forms the boundary between Carrigeen and the neighbouring townland of Rathcannon.

There is not much for a visitor to seek out here in any conventional sense. The wet pasture setting, with a conifer plantation 200 metres to the south, is unremarkable to look at, and the site has shown no surface remains on orthophotos taken between 2005 and 2012, nor on any subsequent Google Earth imagery. What makes it worth knowing about is precisely that absence: a site confirmed from one aerial photograph, taken for an entirely unrelated industrial purpose, on a single autumn day nearly forty years ago, and since then effectively invisible.