This ditch barrow in Ballynamona, County Limerick, left no impression on the Ordnance Survey's historic maps, and by the time satellite cameras began recording the landscape from above, the ground showed nothing at all. What survives is a small circular cropmark, the faint signature a buried structure leaves on the plants growing above it, visible only because a survey aircraft happened to pass overhead at the right moment, in the right season, at the right angle of light.

The site came to light during an aerial survey carried out for Bórd Gáis Éireann's Curraleigh West to Limerick gas pipeline, documented in a photograph catalogued as BGE 1/50000 2553 and taken on the 3rd of November 1984. Cropmarks of this kind appear when a buried ditch or bank affects soil moisture differently from the surrounding ground, causing the grass or crops above to grow at a slightly different rate or colour. The barrow, classified as a ditch barrow, meaning a circular mound defined by an enclosing ditch rather than just a raised bank, sits within reclaimed pasture and belongs to a cluster of eight barrows recorded in the same area. A related ditch barrow lies just 17 metres to the north. Barrows of this type are generally associated with Bronze Age burial practice, though the record compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded in April 2021 does not specify a date for this particular example. The site carries the reference number LI040-061004 within the national monuments record.

There is, practically speaking, nothing to see here in the conventional sense. The OSi orthophotography taken between 2005 and 2012, along with more recent Google Earth imagery, confirms no surface remains are visible. The field has been reclaimed and the ground shows no obvious trace of what lies beneath. The interest of the place is conceptual as much as physical: a burial site that survived millennia underground, escaped the attention of map-makers entirely, and announced itself only briefly, in the form of a pale ring in a grass field, to a camera on a pipeline survey flight. For anyone researching the archaeology of this part of Limerick, the aerial photograph remains the primary evidence, and the broader cluster of barrows in the immediate area suggests this was once a landscape of some ritual or funerary significance.