It took an aerial photographic survey in 1986 to reveal what had been quietly sitting in the wet pasture of Gortacloona all along: a roughly circular earthwork, its surrounding ditch periodically filled with floodwater, marking it out as something far older than the land drains and watercourses that now cut across the same ground.

The monument was identified during the Bruff aerial photographic survey of 1986, recorded as image 224, and later confirmed through a series of satellite orthoimages taken between 2005 and 2020. What those images show is an oval-shaped earthwork measuring approximately 39 metres north to south and 35 metres east to west, defined by a wide fosse, the term for the encircling ditch that typically surrounds an earthen monument of this kind. The fosse is particularly legible in wet conditions: a Google Earth image taken in March 2018 shows it waterlogged almost entirely around the mound, ranging from 13 metres wide at the east to around 20 metres at the west-southwest. An obvious causeway is visible from the southeast to south, which would have provided the original point of access to the central mound. Taken together, the scale of the mound and the breadth of the fosse point toward this being a bowl-barrow, a type of Bronze Age burial monument in which a central mound, typically covering a burial, is enclosed within a circular ditch. A related monument, classified as a ditch-barrow, lies around 130 metres to the southeast. The site was compiled by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly and uploaded to the record in November 2020.

The barrow sits on the floodplain of the Camoge River, which flows roughly 265 metres to the west and marks the townland boundary with Ragamus. That low-lying, boggy setting is both what preserved the monument and what makes it difficult to visit on foot; the surrounding pasture is cut through with land drains, and the fosse itself fills with water in wetter months. The earthwork is not signposted and has no formal public access. The clearest views of its shape and extent are visible in satellite imagery, particularly in late winter or early spring when the fosse floods and the geometry of the monument becomes most legible from above.