Others have spent decades visible only from the air, as faint rings pressed into the soil by the memory of a ditch dug perhaps thousands of years ago. The ditch-barrow at Cahirguillamore, in County Limerick, belongs firmly to the second category. A ditch-barrow is broadly what the name suggests: a circular funerary or ceremonial monument defined not by a raised bank but by an enclosing ditch, often accompanied by an internal mound. At Cahirguillamore, that defining ditch survives not as visible earthwork but as a cropmark, the kind of ghostly ring that appears in aerial photographs when differential soil moisture causes grass or grain above a buried feature to grow or ripen at a slightly different rate to the surrounding field.

The site was identified during the Bruff aerial photographic survey of 1986, recorded in photograph Bruff 68 (reference AP4/3598), when the circular cropmark was spotted from the air in what is now pastureland. Notably, it does not appear on any Ordnance Survey Ireland historic maps, meaning it escaped the attention of earlier cartographers entirely and remained unrecorded until that survey flight passed overhead. The monument sits roughly 325 metres east of the townland boundary with Killorath, and it is not alone in the landscape: a confirmed ditch-barrow lies approximately 120 metres to the southwest, and a possible further example lies immediately to the south-west as well, suggesting a loose cluster of related monuments in this corner of Limerick. The site was compiled for the record by Fiona Rooney and uploaded in March 2021.

Because the feature survives only as a cropmark, there is nothing to see at ground level in the conventional sense. The pasture here gives no obvious sign of what lies beneath. The clearest view remains the aerial one: the faint outline is discernible on the OSi orthophotos taken between 2005 and 2012, and on Google Earth satellite imagery, where the circular trace can be picked out with patience. For anyone curious enough to look, those images offer a direct line back to the 1986 survey photograph, and together they represent the entire visible record of a monument that has otherwise stayed quietly beneath the surface of a Limerick field.