What makes this particular site quietly remarkable is the company it keeps. The field near the Morningstar River, which traces the boundary between the townlands of Elton and Ballinvana, contains not a solitary barrow but part of a cemetery of up to 37 of them, clustered within an area roughly 230 metres north to south and 300 metres east to west. Barrows are earthen or stone-built mounds raised over the dead, most commonly during the Bronze Age, and they are found scattered across Ireland in ones and twos. A concentration of this scale in a single townland is considerably rarer.

The site came to light not through a dedicated excavation but as a byproduct of infrastructure planning. In 1982, the Archaeology Department at University College Cork was commissioned to carry out a Route Selection Study for Bórd Gáis Éireann, working alongside ARUP Pipeline Engineering. The survey, published by Woodman in 1983, first identified the Elton barrow cemetery as a significant find. The Discovery Programme later returned to the area, listing this particular mound as Site No. 24 after examining aerial photographs taken during a gas pipeline survey and a separate photographic survey of the Bruff area carried out in 1986. More recently, a faint cropmark, the kind of ghostly outline that appears in dry summers when buried features affect how grass or grain grows above them, was visible on Digital Globe orthoimagery taken between 2011 and 2013, offering a further, if tentative, confirmation of what lies beneath.

The barrow sits approximately 430 metres northeast of the Morningstar River in wet pasture, which means the ground underfoot is likely to be soft, particularly outside the summer months. There is no formal access or signage, and the site is on agricultural land, so any visit would require landowner permission. The cropmark evidence suggests that dry spells in late summer offer the best chance of seeing something from above, though the view from ground level is subtle at best. For those with access to aerial imagery, the Discovery Programme reference and the Google Earth orthoimages compiled by Martin Fitzpatrick provide the clearest picture of what the landscape conceals.