The Ordnance Survey's historic maps, which recorded countless earthworks across the Irish countryside, never noted this one. It was only in 1986, when aerial photography carried out as part of the Bruff survey passed over Ballynamona, that the monument was picked up at all, its circular outline emerging clearly from altitude in a way that ground-level observation, obscured by drainage channels and improved farmland, had apparently never prompted.

What the cameras caught was a ditch-barrow, a type of funerary or commemorative monument defined by a central mound or platform enclosed within a surrounding fosse, that is, a ditch cut into the earth. The fosse is the defining feature here, giving the monument its classification and distinguishing it from other round earthwork types. The Ballynamona example sits within a broader cluster: two related ditch-barrows lie close by, one 33 metres to the south-east and another 62 metres to the north-west, suggesting this was not an isolated burial or ritual site but part of a deliberately arranged landscape, the precise date and purpose of which remains unrecorded in the available sources. The monument sits roughly 230 metres north-west of a public road that also serves as the townland boundary between Ballynamona and Castlefarm, a boundary that may itself follow much older landscape divisions.

The site is on private farmland in improved, wet pasture cut through by land drains and watercourses, so access would require landowner permission and suitable footwear for boggy ground. The earthwork is not signposted or formally managed. Subsequent aerial and satellite imagery, including OSi orthoimages from 2005 to 2012 and a Google Earth image from March 2017, confirms the fosse remains visible from above, and the circular form is clear enough that someone who knew what to look for could identify it on the ground. The companion barrows to the south-east and north-west, recorded under the same survey, would reward a careful look across the field from the road boundary.