It is a ditch barrow, a type of prehistoric burial monument defined by a circular ditch cut into the ground around a central mound or grave. At ground level, centuries of agricultural improvement and periodic flooding have smoothed almost everything away. The monument only became legible from above.

The site was first identified not by excavation or fieldwork but by a camera pointed downward from an aircraft. During the Bruff aerial photographic survey in 1986, the barrow appeared as a cropmark, a faint circular outline recorded as Bruff 138, AP 4/3722. Cropmarks form when buried features affect how vegetation grows above them; a filled ditch, for instance, retains more moisture than the surrounding soil, producing a slightly lusher or differently coloured strip of crop that becomes visible from altitude, particularly during dry summers. Decades later, the monument showed up again, this time as a visible earthwork on Digital Globe orthophotos taken between 2011 and 2013, and once more on Google Earth imagery captured on 28 June 2018. Its setting adds another layer of interest: the barrow sits on the flood plain of the Dead River and the Mulkear River, the Dead River lying roughly 310 metres to the north and the Mulkear approximately 350 metres beyond that. Whoever chose this spot did so in a landscape shaped by water.

Because the monument survives primarily as a cropmark and a low earthwork, there is little to see on the ground without knowing exactly where to look, and access across private farmland would require the landowner's permission. The orthoimages compiled by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly and uploaded in July 2020 remain the clearest record of what the barrow actually looks like, and comparing the 1986 aerial survey image with the more recent satellite imagery gives a sense of how these things are pieced together over time. For anyone interested in the surrounding landscape, the confluence of the Dead River and Mulkear River corridors is the broader context worth understanding, since river valleys in this part of Limerick drew both settlement and burial activity across many periods of prehistory.