Set in gently undulating wet pasture at Ballynaveen in County Tipperary, the ditch barrow is easy to walk past without registering what it is: a small circular area of ground enclosed by a low earthen scarp and a shallow surrounding fosse, the whole thing barely raising itself above the field around it. A ditch barrow is a form of prehistoric funerary monument, defined by that encircling cut in the earth rather than a raised mound, and this one sits at the eastern edge of a small barrow cemetery whose other members spread out across the pasture to the west and north-west.

The cemetery contains both ring-barrows and ditch barrows, ring-barrows being a related type where a circular earthen bank, rather than a cut fosse, marks the boundary of the monument. Here, the two forms exist within a few dozen metres of each other, the nearest ditch barrow lying only about twenty metres to the west. The monument itself is modest in its proportions: the scarp is around four centimetres high and forty centimetres wide, and the fosse is similarly slight, reaching only about ten centimetres in depth. It is best preserved along its north-to-south axis, becoming barely discernible on the southern approach. The interior is level and free of overgrowth, which is what allowed it to be identified at all during a field inspection rather than from aerial photography or earlier cartographic sources.