That is not a figure of speech. When the archaeologist S. P. Ó Ríordáin surveyed the area in 1934, he noted that the monuments were so low and so slight that a person might easily pass over them without noticing. The most reliable sign of their presence was not any visible mound but a ring of wetter, greener grass, where the circular ditch surrounding each barrow held moisture and fed the vegetation above it. A barrow, in this context, is a prehistoric burial mound, typically a low earthen heap raised over one or more interments and ringed by a shallow ditch sometimes accompanied by an outer bank. At Lissard, even those modest features have largely merged back into the reclaimed pasture.

What Ó Ríordáin found in Lissard was not an isolated monument but a barrow cemetery, a cluster of such burials gathered into a defined landscape. The south-western corner of the townland alone contains eleven barrows, grouped into an area roughly 240 metres north to south and 230 metres east to west, with further barrow cemeteries in adjacent fields to the west and north. In 1935, Ó Ríordáin excavated one barrow within this grouping, located around 140 metres to the north-east of the present site, and published his findings the following year. The ditch barrow described here sits in reclaimed pasture about ten metres east of the townland boundary with Ballynamona, and it does not appear on Ordnance Survey Ireland maps. Aerial imagery taken between 2011 and 2013 shows no surface remains at all.

Because this site carries no marker and registers on no standard map, finding it requires working from archaeological records rather than signposts. The most useful approach is through the National Monuments Service database, where the site is catalogued alongside its neighbouring barrows. The landscape itself is ordinary farmland, and access would depend on landowner permission. The best chance of seeing anything is in damp conditions, ideally in late autumn or early spring, when differential moisture in the old ditch lines encourages that slightly lusher, darker band of grass that Ó Ríordáin described so precisely. Without that seasonal cue, and without knowing exactly where to look, the ground gives almost nothing away.