The example at Ballyphilip in County Limerick takes that already quiet category of monument and makes it quieter still: it sits in low-lying, wet pasture threaded with land drains and watercourses, has never appeared on Ordnance Survey Ireland's historic mapping, and cannot be seen at ground level at all. It exists, in any meaningful sense, only from the air.

The monument came to light during the Bruff aerial photographic survey of 1986, when it was identified as a small circular cropmark in the survey image catalogued as Bruff 15701 (AP 4/3665). Cropmarks of this kind appear when buried features, ditches that have silted up, or the remains of banks and earthworks, cause the vegetation above them to grow differently, either more lushly where soil has accumulated, or more sparsely where compacted material sits close to the surface. Seen from above, particularly in dry summers when the contrast sharpens, these differences in growth betray the outlines of structures that have otherwise vanished entirely. The Ballyphilip barrow measures roughly nine metres east to west and eight metres north to south, placing it firmly in the smaller end of the ring barrow scale. It is not an isolated find either; it sits within what the survey records describe as a large complex of ring barrows in the area, suggesting the landscape around Ballyphilip once carried considerable funerary significance, though the precise period and nature of that use remain unconfirmed from these notes alone. The record was compiled by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly and uploaded in September 2020.

For anyone curious enough to seek it out, the practical reality is that there is little to see from the ground. The surrounding pasture is low-lying and wet, cut through by drainage channels, and the monument leaves no surface trace that the eye can follow. The clearest views remain those from 1986 and the orthoimages taken between 2005 and 2012, along with a Google Earth image from 25 March 2017, all of which show the circular cropmark with reasonable clarity. The site is worth knowing about less as a destination than as a reminder of how much of the Irish prehistoric landscape has effectively sunk below visibility, recoverable only when the grass tells a different story to an aircraft passing overhead.