It exists, for most practical purposes, only from the air, a faint circular shadow roughly six metres across, pressed into reclaimed wet pasture and legible only to cameras and analysts trained to look for it. The monument belongs to a category known as a ditch barrow, a prehistoric burial mound defined not by a raised earthwork but by the encircling ditch that once surrounded it. Centuries of agricultural activity and drainage have worn the surface evidence almost entirely away, leaving just enough of a chemical signature in the soil to show up as a cropmark when conditions are right.

The site came to attention through aerial photograph analysis carried out by the Discovery Programme, the Irish research body dedicated to large-scale archaeological investigation. Examining images of the Rathanny landscape, researchers identified a circular cropmark, the telltale ring left when a buried ditch causes the vegetation above it to grow differently from its surroundings, drawing slightly more moisture or nutrients. The record was compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded to the national monuments database in May 2021. The site sits at the north-eastern end of a cluster of up to eleven possible barrows in the same area, itself lying around 180 metres to the north-east of a much larger and more visually prominent barrow. That larger monument anchors the group; this smaller one, at approximately six metres in diameter, sits quietly at its edge. A faint cropmark was confirmed on a Digital Globe orthophotograph taken between 2011 and 2013, and the ring is also traceable on Google Earth imagery.

For anyone visiting the wider Rathanny area, the practical reality is that there is little to observe at ground level. The land is reclaimed wet pasture, flat and unassuming, and the ditch barrow leaves no visible surface trace. The cropmark itself is most apparent in aerial or satellite imagery taken during dry spells, when differential moisture retention in the soil makes buried features show through the grass. The larger barrow nearby, listed separately, offers a more tangible point of reference for understanding the scale and character of this prehistoric grouping. Consulting the aerial photographs attached to the national monuments record, including the Bruff aerial image on which this site is marked as number ten, gives the clearest sense of how these monuments relate to one another across the landscape.