This one, in the wet pasture of Mitchelstowndown East in County Limerick, does almost the opposite. A ditch barrow, to explain the term, is a funerary or ritual monument defined not by a raised mound but by a circular or enclosing ditch cut into the ground, sometimes with an internal bank. What exists here is, by any honest measure, barely visible at all, and that near-invisibility is precisely what makes it worth considering.

The monument came to attention not through fieldwork but through the sky. Aerial photographs taken on 3 November 1984 as part of the Bórd Gáis Éireann Curraleigh West to Limerick gas pipeline survey captured what appears to be a rectangular cropmark at this location, recorded as Site 241 on photograph reference BGE 1/5000; 2779. Cropmarks of this kind form when buried features such as ditches or banks affect the growth of overlying vegetation, making ancient ground disturbance legible from the air even when nothing remains visible at ground level. The site sits in the north-eastern quadrant of a broader cluster of monuments, with a related earthwork recorded some 15 metres to the west. It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey Ireland six-inch maps, suggesting it was either unrecognised or already too degraded to record during those earlier surveys. A faint trace was still discernible on an OSi orthoimage from late 2005, but by the time Digital Globe and Google Earth imagery was captured between 2011 and 2013, nothing remained visible on the surface at all. The record was compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded to the national monuments database in September 2021.

For anyone making their way to this corner of Limerick, the honest expectation should be set early: there is nothing to see on the ground. The wet pasture that surrounds the site offers no obvious sign of what may lie beneath. The value here is archival rather than visual, and perhaps that is the point. The 1984 pipeline photographs, taken for an entirely practical commercial purpose, ended up preserving evidence of a monument that the land itself has since swallowed. The surrounding cluster of monuments in the same townland gives the broader area some archaeological weight, and visiting with the relevant National Monuments Service records to hand would help place this invisible barrow within its wider landscape context.