At Mooresfort in County Tipperary, a prehistoric burial monument sits in open pasture on a low rise, so subtly expressed in the landscape that it took aerial photography to formally identify it. There is no visible mound, no dramatic earthwork; the interior sits at exactly the same level as the surrounding ground, with only a very shallow encircling fosse marking out the site. A fosse, in this context, is simply a ditch, and here it is a particularly unassuming one, just two and a half metres wide and about ten centimetres deep. The whole circular area measures roughly five and a half metres across.

This type of monument is classified as a ditch barrow, a category of funerary enclosure defined by its surrounding ditch rather than by any raised burial mound. Such features were often created during the Bronze Age, though without excavation the precise date of this example remains unknown. What drew someone to this particular spot in prehistory may not be entirely mysterious: the low rise on which it sits commands good views across the Mooresfort estate to the west, north, and east, the kind of open, elevated position that recurs again and again in the siting of early burial monuments across Ireland. The site was identified through aerial photograph 252/2, which captured the cropmark or shadow of the fosse in a way that ground-level observation had apparently not.