It does not appear on historic Ordnance Survey Ireland maps, and from above, satellite imagery reveals nothing. The only reason anyone knows it exists at all is that someone looked very carefully, and then dug.

This site, catalogued as Mitchelstowndown West 55 and first noted by Eoin Grogan in 1989, sits roughly 135 metres north of the Morningstar River, a small waterway that marks the boundary between the townlands of Mitchelstowndown West and Glenlary. It is one of 53 small barrows, a barrow being a low earthen mound typically raised over a burial or as a funerary marker, clustered in this stretch of the Morningstar Valley. In the summer of 1992, Aoife Daly and Eoin Grogan of the Discovery Programme spent eight weeks excavating four of these mounds. What they found at this particular barrow was a U-shaped ditch, with straight vertical sides and a flat base, filled over time with collapsed material that had sealed a layer of grassy fibres beneath it. A residue of the original mound survived. Among the finds were fragments of chert and flint debitage, the term for the waste flakes produced when knapping stone tools, along with a single retouched chert flake suggesting deliberate shaping. The destruction of this barrow appears to have occurred around the same time as the destruction of a neighbouring one to the west. Daly and Grogan concluded that these sites probably date to the Middle to Late Bronze Age, and, notably, that the barrows may have shifted in function over time, becoming symbolic monuments associated with remembrance rather than primary burial sites, since no conclusive funerary evidence was recovered.

There is nothing to see here in the conventional sense. The site lies in working agricultural land, and without the excavation record there would be no way to identify it at ground level. Two related barrows sit within 40 metres to the south-east and west respectively, and together they speak to a wider funerary landscape concentrated along the Morningstar Valley. For anyone interested in the archaeology of the region, the published summary by Daly and Grogan from 1993 remains the most detailed account of what the ground here once contained.