Somewhere in the rough pasture near Ballinlee, approximately 208 metres west of the Ballygreenan townland boundary, lies what archaeologists classify as a barrow, one of a cluster of three in close proximity. Walk the ground today and you will find nothing obvious to reward you. No mound rises from the grass, no earthwork catches the eye. The site does not appear on Ordnance Survey Ireland historic maps at all, which means it slipped through the usual layers of cartographic record that captured so many other monuments across the Irish countryside.

The site came to light not through fieldwork or antiquarian survey but through a much more prosaic piece of infrastructure. When aerial photographs were taken on 3 November 1984 as part of the Bórd Gáis Éireann Curraleigh to Limerick gas pipeline survey, image reference BGE 1/50000 2544, analysts spotted what appeared to be a possible archaeological feature and logged it as Site No. 039137. A barrow, in this context, refers to a burial mound of prehistoric origin, typically a raised earthen or stone structure covering a grave, though centuries of agriculture can reduce even substantial examples to near-invisibility. A later check using an Ordnance Survey Ireland orthophoto taken between 2005 and 2012 confirmed that no surface remains were visible at all. However, a Google Earth orthoimage dated 5 April 2006 did reveal a faint cropmark, a trace of a small circular earthwork showing through the vegetation in the way that buried features sometimes betray themselves to the camera when dry weather stresses the ground above them. The record was compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded in April 2021.

There is, in practical terms, very little to see at ground level, and the site sits on private agricultural land, so any visit would require the landowner's permission. The cropmark phenomenon that revealed this site is worth understanding: differences in soil depth or moisture caused by a buried ditch or bank can make grass or crops above them grow at a slightly different rate, producing a pattern detectable from altitude that is entirely invisible to someone standing in the field. The spring or early summer, when growth differentials are most pronounced, is typically when such marks are clearest. This particular cluster of three barrows near Ballinlee is the kind of site that rewards those interested in landscape archaeology, the discipline of reading fields and soil rather than walls and stones.