The ditch barrows here are so low, so thoroughly absorbed into the reclaimed pasture, that they leave almost no impression on the eye. What gives them away, if anything does, is a faint circular dampness in the grass, a ring of slightly greener, fresher vegetation tracing the line of a shallow ditch that has been quietly holding water for millennia.

A barrow, in this context, is a prehistoric burial mound, typically a low earthen heap raised over the dead and sometimes enclosed by a ditch and outer bank. The examples at Lissard belong to a barrow cemetery, a clustering of such monuments that suggests a community returning to the same landscape over generations to bury their dead. This particular barrow sits in reclaimed pasture roughly 105 metres east of the townland boundary with Ballynamona, and it is one of eleven that make up a cemetery concentrated within an area of approximately 240 metres north to south by 230 metres east to west. Two further barrow cemeteries lie in adjacent fields to the west and north, which gives some sense of the density of prehistoric funerary activity in this corner of Limerick. The monuments never appeared on historic Ordnance Survey Ireland maps, which means they went formally unrecorded until 1934, when the archaeologist S. P. Ó Ríordáin surveyed the townland and noted that the mounds were so slight that a person might easily walk over them without noticing. He published his findings in 1936, and in 1935 excavated one barrow in the cemetery, located about 90 metres to the northeast of this one. More recently, aerial imagery taken between 2011 and 2013 showed no surface remains at all, confirming just how thoroughly these monuments have been swallowed by the working landscape.

There is no formal public access to these fields, and the site is not signposted or visitor-facing in any way. For those with an interest in early Irish archaeology, the value of Lissard lies less in what can be seen on the ground than in knowing what is there, or rather what is not visible. If the ground is wet after rain, and the season is right, Ó Ríordáin's description of greener rings of vegetation in an otherwise ordinary field becomes suddenly plausible, and the idea of an entire buried cemetery asserting itself through moisture and grass becomes a quietly different way of reading a landscape.