No mound breaks the surface, no standing stone marks the spot, and the Ordnance Survey's historic maps make no mention of it at all. What archaeologists believe to be a ditch barrow, a type of funerary monument defined by a circular ditch cut into the ground rather than an earthen mound raised above it, survives here only as a cropmark, the kind of trace that becomes legible not to the eye on the ground but to a camera looking straight down from altitude.

The site came to light, or rather came to aerial light, during the examination of photographs taken on 3 November 1984 as part of the Bórd Gáis Éireann gas pipeline survey. At a scale of 1 to 10,000, those survey images picked out a circular cropmark roughly five metres in diameter at Baggotstown. Cropmarks appear when buried features, ditches, walls, or pits affect the moisture and nutrition available to the plants growing above them, causing subtle but measurable differences in how the vegetation grows and colours, differences invisible at ground level but readable from above. The monument was subsequently confirmed on Digital Globe orthoimagery taken between 2011 and 2013, and on Google Earth images from the same period. It was formally compiled in the archaeological record by Fiona Rooney, with the record uploaded in June 2021. Approximately thirty metres to the southwest lies a separate enclosed site, also set within the reclaimed pasture, suggesting this corner of Baggotstown may hold more archaeological interest than the landscape immediately suggests.

Because the barrow survives only as a subsurface feature, there is nothing to see at ground level in any conventional sense. Visitors with an interest in aerial archaeology might find it rewarding to compare the Google Earth imagery with the field as it appears in person, noting how completely a monument of this kind can disappear into ordinary farmland. The site sits on private agricultural land, so access would require permission from the landowner. The cropmark is most likely to be legible in aerial or satellite images taken during dry summer conditions, when differential vegetation growth tends to be most pronounced.