What makes this particular example in Gormanstown townland, County Limerick, quietly remarkable is not what can be seen on the ground but what can barely be seen at all. It does not appear on any Ordnance Survey historic maps. It was never recorded by a surveyor walking the land. Instead, it was the pipeline that found it, or rather, the aircraft sent up to photograph the route of a Bord Gáis Éireann gas pipeline that revealed it, preserved in reclaimed pasture, somewhere nobody had formally noted it before.

The site came to light during examination of aerial photographs taken on 3 November 1984, shot at a scale of 1:5000 for the Bord Gáis Éireann pipeline survey, where it was logged as ring-barrow site No. 040213. Cropmarks, the faint differential growth of grass or crops over buried features where soil has been disturbed or compressed, are often the only trace such monuments leave above ground. A second aerial photograph, taken on 13 September 2002 and referenced as ASIAP (307) 17 and 19, showed the site as a semi-circular shaped cropmark, suggesting the monument survives only partially, or that conditions that day captured just one arc of what would originally have been a full circle. The barrow sits approximately 50 metres southwest of the Morningstar River, which forms the townland boundary with Gormanstown, and forms part of a cluster: three further possible barrows lie nearby, with a fourth recorded some 150 metres to the east. The record was compiled by Martin Fitzpatrick and uploaded in May 2021.

By 14 September 2019, a faint outline of the monument was still just discernible on Google Earth orthoimagery, positioned immediately to the east of a farm track running northeast to southwest through the reclaimed pasture. There is nothing to mark it on the ground for a casual visitor, and access to active farmland naturally requires consideration and permission. The site is, in practical terms, the kind of place that exists most fully as a set of coordinates and an archive of aerial images rather than as somewhere to stand beside. Its significance is archaeological rather than visual, a reminder that a considerable amount of prehistoric Ireland remains invisible except from above, or in the right light, at the right time of year, when the grass gives the buried past away.