This barrow near Ballinlee, in County Limerick, belongs to a cluster of six such monuments grouped tightly together in rough pasture, roughly 200 metres west of the townland of Ballygreenan. None of them appear on the Ordnance Survey's historic maps, which means that for much of the period when Ireland was being systematically charted, these burial sites simply went unrecorded.

The site came to light not through any planned archaeological survey, but as a byproduct of infrastructure work. In November 1984, aerial photographs were taken as part of the Bórd Gáis Éireann pipeline project connecting Curraleigh West to Limerick, and when those images were examined, a possible circular earthwork was identified and logged as Site No. 039136. A barrow, in broad terms, is a prehistoric burial mound, typically round and sometimes surrounded by a ditch, built to mark and enclose the remains of the dead. What makes this one particularly elusive is that it has no meaningful surface expression. A later orthophotograph taken by Ordnance Survey Ireland sometime between 2005 and 2012 shows only a faint cropmark, the kind of subtle discolouration in vegetation that reveals buried features when conditions are right, usually during a dry summer when buried ditches retain moisture differently from the surrounding soil. By the time Google Earth imagery was reviewed, nothing at all was visible on the ground.

For anyone curious enough to seek it out, the site lies in rough pasture and there are no managed paths or formal access points noted in the records compiled by Fiona Rooney, who uploaded the site details in April 2021. Given that no surface remains are visible, there is little to see on a ground-level visit without specialist equipment or prior knowledge of the exact location. The real interest here is perhaps conceptual rather than visual: a dry summer, the right angle of light, and a camera pointed downward from altitude can reveal what centuries of farming and mapping have otherwise obscured. The wider cluster of six barrows in this small area suggests the landscape around Ballinlee once held some significance as a place for the dead, even if that significance is now almost entirely invisible.