That accidental discovery, buried in the paperwork of an infrastructure project, is how this ring-barrow in the townland of Gormanstown entered the archaeological record at all.

A ring-barrow is a low, roughly circular funerary mound, typically of Bronze Age origin, enclosed by a surrounding ditch known as a fosse and sometimes an outer bank. The example here sits in reclaimed pasture about 65 metres south-west of the Morningstar River, which forms the boundary between townlands. It was first identified as site No. 040211 during analysis of aerial photographs taken on 3 November 1984 for Bórd Gáis Éireann at a scale of 1 to 5000. Later aerial photography, carried out on 13 September 2002 under reference ASIAP (307) 17 and 19, revealed it more clearly as a sunken, C-shaped area defined by a low bank with an external fosse. It belongs to a cluster of three possible barrows in the immediate vicinity, catalogued together as LI040-071001 to 003, with a fourth example recorded 170 metres to the east. The record was compiled by Martin Fitzpatrick and uploaded in May 2021.

The monument is heavily levelled, and what remains visible on the ground amounts to very little without the benefit of aerial imagery. On Google Earth orthoimages, a faint outline of the earthwork can still be traced if you know what to look for, the slight ghosting of an ancient circular form in the field's surface. The surrounding pasture gives no obvious indication of what lies beneath, and there is no marker or signage. The best way to appreciate the site is to examine the aerial photographs held in the record before visiting, so that the C-shaped shadow in the grass makes sense when you are standing in the field looking at what otherwise appears to be ordinary farmland.