This particular barrow, a ditch barrow being a low funerary mound encircled by a surrounding ditch, sits in wet grassland roughly 400 metres northeast of the Morningstar River, which itself marks the boundary between the townlands of Elton and Ballinvana. What makes it quietly remarkable is not the mound itself, which is largely imperceptible at ground level, but the company it keeps. It is one of up to 37 possible barrows identified within a surprisingly compact area measuring approximately 230 metres north to south and 300 metres east to west, suggesting this corner of County Limerick was once a place of considerable ceremonial significance to the people who buried their dead here.

The existence of this barrow cemetery was not established through deliberate archaeological prospection but emerged almost incidentally from infrastructure planning. In 1982, the Archaeology Department of University College Cork carried out a Route Selection Study for Bórd Gáis Éireann, working in consultation with ARUP Pipeline Engineering. It was this survey, published by Woodman in 1983, that first identified the Elton complex. The Discovery Programme later listed this particular mound as Site No. 25 after examining aerial images taken during a gas pipeline survey and photographs from a 1986 Bruff aerial photographic survey. More recently, faint cropmarks, the ghostly outlines that buried features leave on vegetation during dry summers, have been visible on Digital Globe orthoimages taken between 2011 and 2013 and on a Google Earth image captured in September 2019. The archaeology, in other words, has been read almost entirely from above.

Accessing the site requires crossing wet pasture, and the ground near the Morningstar River can be heavy going depending on the season; late summer, when soil moisture drops and cropmarks are at their clearest, is also the time when any surface traces are easiest to interpret. There is nothing dramatic to see at ground level, and the mound is not signposted or managed as a visitor site. For those with an interest in landscape archaeology, the area rewards careful attention to the slight undulations in the field surface, and comparing a visit against the available aerial imagery beforehand will sharpen the eye considerably.