It would almost certainly remain unknown were it not for a set of aerial photographs taken during a survey for an entirely unrelated purpose. A ditch barrow is, broadly speaking, a low funerary mound encircled by a surrounding ditch rather than a raised bank, and this one measures roughly four metres in diameter, which places it at the more modest end of such monuments. It sits in reclaimed wet pasture, a landscape that has been progressively drained and worked over centuries, which may help explain why so little of it survives above ground.

The site came to light during examination of aerial photographs taken on 3 November 1984 for Bórd Gáis Éireann's gas pipeline survey, shot at a scale of 1 to 5,000. Analysts reviewing those images identified a circular feature in the fields of Ballinvana, approximately 94 metres southwest of the Morningstar River, which marks the townland boundary with Elton, and about 140 metres south of the boundary with Stephenstown. The feature was later tentatively confirmed as a possible ditch barrow through a circular cropmark visible on a Google Earth orthoimage dated 5 April 2006, and faint traces were still discernible on Digital Globe imagery taken between 2011 and 2013. It is considered one of up to six possible barrows in the vicinity, all potentially associated with a wider field system in the same townland, a grouping that suggests this corner of east Limerick may preserve the fragmentary outline of a prehistoric agricultural and funerary landscape. The record was compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded to the national monuments database in June 2021.

There is nothing to see here in the conventional sense. The monument has no surface expression visible to the naked eye, no marker, and no formal access point. What draws anyone to look at it at all is the cropmark itself, the way a buried ditch slightly alters soil moisture and produces a faint ring of differential growth in a crop or pasture, legible only from altitude under the right conditions of drought or low-angle light. The site lies in working farmland close to the Morningstar River, and any visit would require both permission from the landowner and an acceptance that the ground will offer little visual reward. The interest here is almost entirely conceptual: a monument known only through the indirect reading of photographs taken for an unrelated industrial project, surviving as a trace in images rather than in stone or earthwork.