It is not a feature you would notice on foot, and it carries no signpost or monument number in the landscape itself. What it may be is a ditch-barrow, a type of prehistoric funerary monument defined by a low central mound enclosed within a surrounding ditch, the whole structure now so thoroughly flattened by centuries of agricultural use that it survives only as a ghostly impression in the soil beneath the grass.

The site in Ballinstona South, recorded under the reference LI040-275----, was identified not by excavation or fieldwork on the ground but by aerial photography, specifically the Bruff aerial photographic survey carried out in 1986. That survey, catalogued as Bruff 142, AP 5/2115, captured a circular cropmark at the location, the kind of subtle discolouration in growing crops or grass that reveals buried archaeology to a camera looking straight down. Cropmarks of this sort appear because buried ditches and banks alter how moisture moves through the soil, which in turn affects how plants grow above them, making features invisible at ground level suddenly legible from the air. The trace was visible again in Ordnance Survey Ireland orthophotographs taken between 2005 and 2012, and once more in a Google Earth image dated 16 March 2016, which gives some confidence that what was caught in 1986 was not a passing anomaly. The site sits approximately 140 metres south of the townland boundary with Ballinstona North, with a second possible barrow lying around 115 metres to the south-east.

Because the monument is in private pasture and has no surface expression, there is little to see from any public road or right of way. The record was compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded to the national database in July 2021, and the evidence for the site remains entirely aerial. Anyone with a serious interest in the monument is best served by examining the archived Bruff photograph and the available orthoimages rather than attempting to locate the spot in the field, where the circular cropmark will only be legible, if at all, during dry spells in late spring or summer when moisture stress in the ground makes buried features show most clearly in the vegetation above them.