A barrow is, in simple terms, a burial mound, and the ditch variety is defined by a surrounding circular ditch rather than, or as well as, an earthen mound above. What makes this particular example worth attention is less what it looks like on the ground, where it is effectively invisible to a casual walker, and more what it represents within the surrounding concentration of monuments.

The site was first formally identified in 1936, when the archaeologist Ó Ríordáin surveyed the area and recorded it in print. It sits in the northern quadrant of a group of fourteen barrows, a cluster that already suggests sustained prehistoric funerary activity in this part of County Limerick. An enclosure of a different type lies approximately 165 metres to the south-west, and a separate barrow cemetery extends to the south and south-south-west, pointing to a landscape that was, at some point in prehistory, organised around the commemoration of the dead across a considerable area. Despite all of this, the monument was never picked up by the cartographers who produced the historic Ordnance Survey maps of Ireland, meaning it passed unrecorded in that particular tradition for generations.

The monument is not something a visitor can easily trace on foot; its clearest expression comes from above. A circular cropmark, the kind of faint discolouration in growing vegetation that reveals buried features to aerial cameras, was recorded on Digital Globe orthoimagery taken between 2011 and 2013, and was also clearly visible on a Google Earth image dated 10 October 2006. Cropmarks of this kind appear most reliably during dry summers, when buried ditches retain moisture differently from the surrounding soil and the difference shows in the colour of the grass or grain above. The site lies about twenty metres north-west of a drainage ditch, which provides a useful locating reference on satellite imagery for anyone curious enough to look it up on an online mapping tool before visiting the general area.