It is all the more striking, then, that a prehistoric burial mound sitting in plain sight on flat ground there went unrecorded on Ordnance Survey maps and unmentioned in the literature until 1980. No dramatic concealment explains the oversight; the barrow simply sat there, unremarked, while scholars catalogued its neighbours.

The monument is a bowl-barrow, a type of low, rounded earthen mound raised over prehistoric burials, typically circular or oval in plan and lacking the surrounding bank and ditch, known as a fosse, found in more elaborate examples. This one is oval, measuring roughly 17.25 metres along its north-northwest to south-southeast axis and 15 metres across, with a height of about 1.4 metres. Its base edges have been noticeably squared off by ploughing over the years, which has altered its original profile. The Swedish archaeologist Göran Burenhult was the first to formally list it, designating it Barrow 1 at Carrowmore in 1980, a designation confirmed and described in more detail by Timoney in 1984. A separate researcher, Kitchin, noted it in 1983 simply as "unrecorded", a label that captures something of its quiet status in the archaeological record. The monument lies to the southwest of another recorded site in the Carrowmore complex, and its absence from earlier maps and surveys is not easily explained by its size or setting.