No mound rises from the ground, no stones break the surface. The only evidence of its existence came from the sky, when satellite imagery captured a faint circular mark in the soil, roughly 20 metres across, tracing the outline of a buried ditch.

What the imagery appears to show is a ditch-barrow, a funerary monument type in which a circular ditch was dug around a burial, sometimes with a low internal mound that has since been ploughed or eroded flat over the centuries. The cropmark, visible on Digital Globe orthoimagery taken between 2011 and 2013, forms when buried features such as ditches retain moisture differently from the surrounding undisturbed soil, causing the grass or crops above them to grow at a slightly different rate. From ground level the difference is invisible; from altitude it resolves into a ring. This particular example was identified by Johnny Ryan, an archaeologist with the Forestry Inspectorate of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, and the site sits close to Lough Derravaragh, a lake in the Irish midlands perhaps best known from the legend of the Children of Lir.

The monument has not been excavated, and its date and precise character remain unconfirmed. The classification as a possible ditch-barrow is a reasonable inference from the shape and scale of the cropmark, but the ground beneath the pasture has not yet been opened to confirm what lies there. It is the kind of site that exists in a strange intermediate state, known and recorded, yet still effectively invisible to anyone standing in the field above it.