This one in Ballynahinch, County Limerick, offers something rather more elusive: a possible barrow that has effectively vanished, detectable only in a single set of aerial photographs taken decades ago and absent from every map and satellite image since. A barrow, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a burial mound, typically prehistoric, raised over the remains of the dead and often circular in form. This particular example, catalogued as LI040-127002-, was never marked on Ordnance Survey Ireland historic maps, and by the time satellite imagery caught up with the area, there was nothing to see.

The site was identified not through any deliberate archaeological survey but as an incidental discovery during infrastructure work. Aerial photographs taken on 3 November 1984, as part of the Bórd Gáis Éireann Curraleigh West-Limerick gas pipeline project, captured what appeared to be a small circular feature sitting in a clearance roughly 90 metres to the northeast of a reference point within the surrounding coniferous plantation. The photographs, referenced as BGE 1/5000 2571, Strip map 4, 4/38, provided enough detail for the feature to be tentatively classified as a barrow, though no excavation or ground-truthing appears to have confirmed this. By the time Digital Globe orthoimagery was taken between 2011 and 2013, no surface remains were visible, and subsequent Google Earth imagery has not recovered the feature either. The record was formally compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded to the national monuments database in June 2021.

For anyone curious enough to seek out the location, expectations should be modest and appropriately calibrated. The site sits within a modern coniferous plantation, the kind of dense, managed forestry that tends to suppress both ground vegetation and any subtle earthworks that might otherwise survive as slight rises or depressions in open pasture. There is no visible monument to find, no marker, and no guaranteeing that the circular feature observed in 1984 was a barrow at all rather than some other, more prosaic irregularity in the ground. What makes the visit worthwhile, if anything does, is the particular quality of attention it requires: looking at a landscape and understanding that something may once have been here, recorded in a strip of aerial film during a gas pipeline survey, and now absorbed entirely back into the trees.