It does not appear on any Ordnance Survey Ireland historic maps, meaning it passed unrecorded through the entire era of systematic Irish land mapping. What eventually revealed it was not a fieldwork survey or an antiquarian's notebook, but the shadow of its own ditch, read from the air.

A ditch barrow, sometimes called a ring barrow, is a prehistoric burial monument defined by a circular earthen mound enclosed within a surrounding fosse, which is simply a dug ditch or trench. The fosse is what gives these monuments their characteristic silhouette when seen from above, and it is precisely that feature which allowed this example to be identified. An aerial photograph taken on 10 May 2003, held in the Aerial Survey and Image Archive of the Archaeological Survey of Ireland, shows a small circular area defined by just such a fosse. Subsequent orthophotographs taken by Ordnance Survey Ireland between 2005 and 2012, and imagery available through Google Earth, confirm a trace of a circular-shaped cropmark at the same location. Cropmarks form when buried features alter the growth rate of vegetation above them, creating patterns that become legible from altitude even when nothing is visible at ground level. The monument sits in wet pasture approximately 190 metres south of the River Mahore, and around 20 metres east of a possible enclosure recorded separately in the Sites and Monuments Record. The record was compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded in April 2021.

The site is in working agricultural land, so access is not guaranteed and the ground, described as wet pasture, is likely to be soft underfoot for much of the year. There is nothing visible at surface level to indicate the barrow's presence; the earthwork does not survive as a mound in any obvious way. What can be appreciated, with the aerial photographs in mind, is the landscape context, the low-lying ground close to the Mahore, the proximity to what may be a related enclosure just to the west. For anyone interested in the archaeology of the Irish midlands and the way monuments quietly persist below the surface of ordinary farmland, this is a useful case study in how much remains to be found by looking, quite literally, from a different angle.