No mound rises from the grass, no stones break the surface, and the Ordnance Survey's historic maps make no mention of it at all. What archaeologists believe to be a barrow, a burial mound of the kind constructed across Ireland from the Neolithic through the early medieval period, survives here only as a faint circular trace readable from the air, the ghost of an earthwork pressed into the soil beneath modern farmland.

The site came to light not through excavation or local tradition, but through a pipeline. In November 1984, aerial photographs were taken as part of a survey for the Bórd Gáis Éireann Curraleigh to Limerick gas pipeline. Among the images, reference number BGE 1/50000 2514, a possible circular earthwork appeared as a cropmark, the subtle variation in vegetation colour and growth that sometimes betrays buried archaeological features beneath the surface. Cropmarks form when buried ditches or banks affect the moisture and nutrients available to plants above them, making the hidden structure legible only under the right conditions of drought and low sun angle. The site, catalogued as Site No. 039135, sits approximately 30 metres north of the Ballinlee North townland boundary and 130 metres east of the boundary with Parkroe. A known enclosure lies around 170 metres to the northeast. Fiona Rooney compiled the formal record, uploaded in April 2021, which notes that faint traces remain visible on Google Earth orthoimages, though no surface remains were recorded on Ordnance Survey orthophotos taken between 2005 and 2012.

For anyone curious enough to look, the most practical approach is through satellite imagery rather than a visit on foot. On the ground, there is simply nothing to see; the pasture gives no indication of what may lie beneath it. The site holds a particular kind of interest for those drawn to the archaeology of absence, places where the evidence is so slight that the site's very existence depends on the angle of a camera from a survey aircraft on a November morning forty years ago. If you do consult aerial or satellite imagery, look for the faint circular shadow in the grass, easy to miss, and easier still to dismiss as a trick of the light.