Lying in wet pasture roughly 460 metres north-east of the Morningstar River, which marks the townland boundary between Elton and Ballinvana in County Limerick, this ditch barrow is one of up to 37 such features clustered within a surprisingly compact area, measuring around 230 metres north to south and 300 metres east to west. A barrow, in this context, is a prehistoric earthen mound used for burial, often ringed by a surrounding ditch, and the concentration of them here suggests this corner of County Limerick once served as a significant ceremonial landscape for the communities who lived nearby.

The site came to light not through a dedicated excavation but as a side effect of infrastructure planning. In 1982, the Archaeology Department at University College Cork was commissioned to carry out a Route Selection Study for Bórd Gáis Éireann, working in consultation with ARUP Pipeline Engineering. The resulting report, attributed to Woodman in 1983, was the first to formally identify the Elton barrow cemetery. The Discovery Programme later listed this particular feature as a potential barrow, designated Site No. 28, following examination of aerial images taken during the gas pipeline surveys and a separate aerial photographic survey of the Bruff area carried out in 1986. Decades later, a faint cropmark, the kind of ghostly ring or shape that appears in growing crops above buried features when soil conditions are right, was still visible on Digital Globe orthoimagery captured between 2011 and 2013.

Because the site sits in wet pasture and has never been the subject of open excavation, there is little to see on the ground without prior knowledge of what you are looking for. The landscape itself, low-lying and damp near the Morningstar River, is the kind that tends to preserve buried archaeology well beneath the surface. The cropmark evidence suggests the ditch surrounding the mound is still present underground, even if the mound above it has long since been levelled by centuries of agriculture. Aerial or satellite images offer the clearest view; on the ground, the best chance of picking out any trace comes in a dry summer, when differential soil moisture above buried features can show up faintly in grass or tillage.