In reclaimed pasture roughly 400 metres south-west of Ballincolloo House in County Limerick, there may or may not be a barrow, the term for a prehistoric earthen mound raised over a burial, that has left no trace on historic maps and no visible mark on the modern landscape. It is, in the most literal sense, a place that has nearly vanished.

The site came to light not through excavation or field survey but through the lens of an aerial camera mounted above a gas pipeline route. On 3 November 1984, photographs taken during the Bord Gáis Éireann Curraleigh West-Limerick pipeline project were later examined and yielded what surveyors logged as a potential barrow, assigned site number 040233. Aerial photography has long been one of archaeology's more reliable tools for spotting features invisible at ground level, particularly cropmarks, where buried structures cause vegetation above them to grow at slightly different rates, creating faint outlines readable only from height. The site is listed alongside a second possible barrow lying just 15 metres to its south-east, which adds a small layer of interest, since barrows are occasionally found in loose clusters. Neither feature appears on Ordnance Survey Ireland historic maps, and later examination of Google Earth orthoimages, the standard overhead imagery used in modern desktop survey, showed no surface remains at all. The record was compiled by Martin Fitzpatrick and uploaded to the national monuments database in June 2021.

There is, honestly, little for a visitor to observe. The land is reclaimed pasture, the kind of quietly altered countryside common across the Limerick plain, and nothing breaks the surface to indicate what may lie beneath. The value of coming here, if one were inclined, is more conceptual than visual: a chance to stand in a field where the past has been almost completely absorbed into the ground, known only because a gas company flew a camera over it forty years ago.