What makes this particular corner of Ballynamona quietly remarkable is not what you can see, but what is known to be there: one of nine barrows arranged in a tight cemetery that stretches roughly 240 metres north to south and just 50 metres east to west, a concentrated cluster of the dead that once would have been a conspicuous feature of the local landscape.

A barrow, in its simplest form, is a burial mound, typically ringed by a ditch from which earth was originally dug to raise the central mound. The Ballynamona group was investigated in 1934 by the archaeologist S. P. Ó Ríordáin, who excavated six of the nine barrows and published his findings in 1936. The site recorded as number II, located in what he called Field C, produced an intriguing detail. Beneath and around it, partly overlapping the ditch but notably not sitting over it, was a setting of small stones forming a rough pavement. Ó Ríordáin concluded that this paved surface predated the barrow itself, meaning something, or someone, had already marked this ground before the mound was ever raised. Part of that same paved area was flecked with charcoal, a trace of burning whose purpose the excavation records do not elaborate on.

The site sits approximately 70 metres south-west of a stream and 235 metres south-west of the townland boundary with Lissard. Aerial imagery taken between 2011 and 2013, as well as more recent Google Earth orthoimages, show no surface remains whatsoever. The pasture has reclaimed everything. For anyone drawn to the spot regardless, the terrain is wet underfoot and the setting is thoroughly unremarkable to the eye; the interest lies entirely in knowing what lies below, and in the small puzzle Ó Ríordáin left unresolved: a pavement older than the burial that was built above it, and a scattering of charcoal that no one has fully explained.