This one is barely there at all. In a field of improved pasture in Kildromin, County Limerick, a prehistoric ditch barrow survives only as a faint circular cropmark roughly ten metres across, its outline pressed into the land so lightly that it remained unrecorded on Ordnance Survey historic maps entirely. The ground has been cut through by land drains and watercourses over the years, and whatever physical presence the monument once had has been gradually flattened or erased by agricultural improvement. What remains is essentially a trace, a whisper of a burial monument that is only legible from the air.

The site came to light during the Bruff aerial photographic survey in 1986, when the cropmark was captured in survey image 197.02 as a small circular form in the soil. Cropmarks of this kind appear when buried features such as ditches or banks affect the growth of surface vegetation, with crops or grass growing slightly differently above disturbed or compacted ground, differences that become visible only under certain conditions of drought or low light from altitude. The monument is identified as the second southernmost of a cluster of four possible barrows in the area, catalogued together under reference numbers LI032-251001 through to LI032-251004. It sits approximately 80 metres northeast of the townland boundary between Kildromin and Ballynagranagh, a boundary that runs along the line of a public road. The cropmark remained faintly visible in Ordnance Survey Ireland orthoimagery taken between 2005 and 2012, and was still detectable in a Google Earth image captured on 20 March 2018, compiled as part of a record by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly and uploaded in November 2020.

There is nothing to see at ground level. The field is private agricultural land, and the monument itself leaves no visible impression to the naked eye from a roadside vantage. The nearby public road that traces the Ballynagranagh townland boundary offers the closest accessible approach, though even then the monument's location within the pasture is only meaningful if you have the aerial imagery to hand for reference. The interest here is less in visiting than in the knowledge that the field holds something, that beneath the drained and managed grass, the circular shadow of a ditch barrow, a type of burial monument defined by an encircling ditch rather than a raised mound, persists in the soil, waiting for the right angle of light and the right dry season to briefly make itself known again.