This is a ditch barrow, a type of earthwork in which a circular area is defined not by a raised mound but by a surrounding ditch or scarp, leaving a relatively level interior. The monument at Crean, in the Smallcounty barony, measures roughly nine metres northwest to southeast and eight metres northeast to southwest, its boundary marked by a low scarp just over half a metre wide and fifteen centimetres high. Modest dimensions, but the form is legible enough once you know what you are looking at.

The site owes its official discovery not to any archaeological fieldwork but to a gas pipeline. When Bórd Gáis Éireann was routing the Curraleigh West to Limerick pipeline in the early 1980s, aerial photographs taken on 3 November 1984 caught a circular cropmark in the fields below. Cropmarks form when buried features, such as ditches or banks, affect the growth of vegetation above them, making the underlying archaeology readable from altitude even when nothing is visible at ground level. The site was logged as earthwork number 031186 and sat in the record for over two decades before the Archaeological Survey of Ireland carried out a ground survey in 2007, confirming the scarp and the level, nettle-covered interior. A faint circular cropmark remained visible on Ordnance Survey Ireland orthophotos taken between 2005 and 2012, and on a Google Earth image dated 5 April 2006. Two enclosures lie nearby, one roughly 80 metres to the southeast and another about 180 metres to the northeast, suggesting this part of the Limerick countryside was once considerably more active than its present agricultural quietness implies.

The barrow sits in pasture on a gentle north-facing slope, with open views running from the southwest around to the northwest. There is no formal access or signage, and the surrounding land is agricultural, so any visit should be approached with permission from the landowner. The interior scarp is low and would be easy to walk over without noticing it; the nettles that cover the interior are a more reliable indicator of where to look. The site is best appreciated in conjunction with the aerial photographs held in the record, where the geometry of the cropmark reads far more clearly than anything visible on the ground.