That is precisely what happened with this ditch barrow in the townland of Kildromin, which remained unrecorded until an aerial photographic survey passed over the area in 1986 and caught something unusual in the grass below. A barrow, in the broadest sense, is a prehistoric burial monument, and the ditch variety is defined not by an upstanding mound but by a surrounding fosse, that is, a broad encircling ditch, which once set the monument apart from the landscape around it.

The Bruff aerial photographic survey of 1986 first identified the site, catalogued as Bruff 160.01 (AP 4/3633), where it showed up as a semi-circular cropmark, the kind of subtle difference in vegetation colour and growth that reveals buried features during dry summers when soil moisture varies over hidden ditches and banks. Later satellite and ortho imagery, including OSi images taken between 2005 and 2012, a Digital Globe capture from 2011 to 2013, and a Google Earth image dated 25 March 2017, confirmed the monument as a suboval earthwork measuring roughly 35 metres northwest to southeast and 29 metres northeast to southwest. The defining feature is a broad fosse some 7 metres wide. A field boundary and land drain running northwest to southeast have clipped the southwestern edge, cutting into and truncating the monument. Two further enclosures recorded in the national monuments database lie close by, one just 10 metres to the southwest and another around 162 metres to the northeast, suggesting this low-lying stretch of pasture carries a denser archaeological footprint than its appearance suggests.

The site sits on low-lying wet pasture, cut through by land drains and watercourses, around 470 metres southwest of the townland boundary with Milltown. There is no public access trail to it, and the ground conditions, boggy and drained in roughly equal measure, make any approach on foot a muddy exercise, particularly outside of summer. The earthwork is not visible to the eye in the way a more prominent monument might be; what a visitor would see is a subtle rise and depression in a working agricultural field, with the clearest impression coming from aerial imagery rather than ground level. The record was compiled by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly and uploaded to the national monuments database in November 2020, meaning this particular corner of Kildromin has only formally existed in the archaeological record for a handful of years.