The Elton barrow cemetery, situated in wet pasture on a low ridge near the townland boundary with Knocklong West, holds up to 28 barrows recorded within that one field. A barrow, in simple terms, is a mounded earthwork raised over a burial, often ringed by a ditch, and dating in Irish contexts to the Bronze Age or earlier. That so many should cluster together in a single agricultural field, with so little visible on the surface today, is precisely what makes Elton quietly remarkable.

The site came to wider attention through the work of the Discovery Programme, the State-funded body responsible for large-scale archaeological research in Ireland. Having identified this location as a potential site during examination of the Bruff aerial photographic survey, the programme carried out both a topographic survey and a magnetometry survey of the field. The topographic survey revealed sixteen barrows clearly visible as surface features, while the magnetometry survey, which detects buried features by measuring variations in soil magnetism rather than requiring excavation, identified twenty-two in total. A faint cropmark, the kind of ghostly outline that appears in aerial photographs when buried archaeology affects crop growth above it, was also noted on Digital Globe imagery taken between 2011 and 2013. The work was compiled by Martin Fitzpatrick and uploaded to the record in June 2021, drawing on earlier fieldwork documented by Doody in 1999.

The site lies in wet pasture approximately 110 metres west of a watercourse that marks the townland boundary, so the ground underfoot can be soft and the approach is likely to require sturdy footwear. There is nothing dramatic to see from the field itself, which is part of the interest: the archaeology here is almost entirely subsurface, legible only through the instruments and surveys that have slowly revealed it. The Discovery Programme's digital terrain model and topographic survey images, available through their online archive, give the clearest sense of what is actually present beneath the grass, and are worth consulting before or after any visit to understand the scale and arrangement of burials concentrated in this otherwise unremarkable corner of Limerick.