This one, a possible ring-barrow in the pastureland of County Limerick, offers none of that. No surface trace survives, at least none that can be seen from the ground or on satellite imagery, and the site never appeared on the historic Ordnance Survey Ireland maps that recorded so much of the Irish landscape in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its existence was inferred entirely from the air, and only by accident.

A ring-barrow is a burial monument of prehistoric origin, typically consisting of a low central mound enclosed by a circular ditch and sometimes an outer bank. They are scattered across the Irish countryside in varying states of preservation, though many have been reduced to near-invisibility by centuries of ploughing, drainage, and agricultural improvement. This particular site, located in pasture roughly 70 metres west of the Ballyfauskeen townland boundary, came to light in aerial photographs taken on 3 November 1984 during survey work for the Bórd Gáis Éireann Curraleigh West-Limerick gas pipeline. The photographs, recorded on Strip Map 3 as site 3/4, showed crop or soil marks consistent with a possible ring-barrow. A second possible barrow, recorded separately, lies approximately 300 metres to the south. The site was compiled and uploaded to the archaeological record by Martin Fitzpatrick in November 2021.

Because no surface remains are visible, this is not a site where you arrive and immediately see something. The interest lies in the method of discovery as much as the monument itself. Anyone curious enough to seek out the general area, which sits in ordinary working farmland on the Limerick plain, will find little to look at directly. The value is in knowing that beneath an unremarkable field, faint circular traces in the soil once caught the light at the right angle, on the right November morning, from a plane passing overhead on entirely unrelated business.