It appears on none of the historic OS maps, which makes it something of an anomaly: a monument that survived centuries of agricultural activity while simultaneously slipping through the net of one of the most systematic landscape-recording exercises in Irish history. It was only spotted from the air, during the Bruff aerial photographic survey of 1986, when the shape of the ground finally gave it away.

The monument is a ditch-barrow, a type of prehistoric burial mound defined not by an external bank but by an encircling ditch, or fosse, cut into the earth around a central mound. The fosse is essentially a quarry ditch from which material was originally dug to construct or cover the mound itself. This particular example sits roughly 200 metres northwest of a public road that doubles as the townland boundary between Ballynamona and Castlefarm, and it is not alone in the landscape: two further ditch-barrows lie 33 metres and 105 metres to the northwest respectively, suggesting this corner of south County Limerick held some significance in the prehistoric period. The site was formally recorded under reference Bruff 231.02 and has since been confirmed by multiple aerial and satellite imaging sources, including OSi orthoimagery from 2005 to 2012, Digital Globe imagery from 2011 to 2013, and a Google Earth image captured in March 2017. The record was compiled by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly and uploaded in November 2020.

The site sits on privately owned agricultural land and is not publicly accessible in any formal sense. The ground is described as wet pasture, cut through by land drains and watercourses, so the going underfoot would be difficult at most times of year and particularly so in winter. The earthwork itself is low-lying and subtle at ground level; the circular definition that makes it legible in aerial photographs is far less obvious when you are standing beside it. Anyone with a serious interest in the monument would do better consulting the aerial survey images first, which show the fosse and central mound far more clearly than a visit to the field margins could.