The burial mounds at Ballyrobin, in County Tipperary, do none of that. At ground level, in a low-lying stretch of wet pasture, there is simply nothing to see. The land gives no indication that anything lies beneath it, and no edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the standard cartographic record for Irish historical features, ever noted their presence.

What revealed them was a single aerial photograph, reference Bruff No. 5/2030, in which the grass and waterlogged soil betrayed a faint but legible pattern: approximately five circular areas, closely grouped, each roughly ten metres across. These are barrows, a broad term for prehistoric burial mounds that were once raised over the dead, typically during the Bronze Age, though they appear across a wide span of Irish prehistory. At Ballyrobin, if mounds were ever raised here, the centuries of cultivation and wet ground have pressed them flat, leaving only the subtle crop or soil marks that aerial survey occasionally catches when the light and season align. The grouping of five in close proximity suggests a cemetery rather than a single isolated burial, a community of the dead gathered in one corner of a field that has long since forgotten them.