This one, in the townland of Ballinstona North in County Limerick, does almost the opposite. It exists, as far as anyone can tell, as a faint outline glimpsed from above, in reclaimed pasture east of a small watercourse that marks the boundary with the neighbouring townland of Ballyania. By the time most people thought to look closely, the ground had already moved on.

The site was identified not by fieldwork but by aerial photograph, taken on 5 January 2003 as part of the Archaeological Survey of Ireland's aerial photography programme. The image suggested the presence of a barrow, the general term for a prehistoric burial mound, typically constructed during the Bronze Age as a monument to the dead, sometimes covering a cist grave or cremated remains beneath a raised earthen or stone cairn. This particular site is catalogued as one of three possible barrows in close proximity, recorded under the reference numbers LI039-159/161. Crucially, it never appeared on Ordnance Survey Ireland's historic maps, which means it left no trace in the cartographic record that stretches back centuries. By the time an orthophoto was taken between 2005 and 2012, a field drain running roughly northwest to southeast had truncated the area, and no surface remains were visible. A Google Earth image from April 2013 still showed a faint outline, but another taken in September 2019 showed nothing at all. The record was compiled by Martin Fitzpatrick and uploaded in May 2021.

There is very little for a visitor to see on the ground, and that is rather the point of this entry. The field sits in ordinary reclaimed pasture, unremarkable to the eye, the watercourse boundary with Ballyania easy to miss entirely. What lingers is the idea that the landscape here almost certainly held something, a monument built by people who wanted to mark a life or a place in lasting terms, and that it has been quietly erased by drainage and agriculture over recent decades. If you are in the area with an interest in how much archaeology disappears before it can be properly examined, the three candidate barrows in this cluster, visible now only in archival aerial imagery, offer a sobering illustration of how provisional our knowledge of the prehistoric countryside really is.