The southern of two ring-barrows at Ballingoola in County Limerick is precisely that kind of place. A ring-barrow, to explain the term, is a low circular earthwork defined by a shallow ditch and a slight outer bank, typically associated with prehistoric burial or ceremonial activity. This one measures roughly six metres in diameter. It sits in wet pasture, five metres east of a tributary of the Camoge River, and it does not appear on the Ordnance Survey's historic maps. Aerial photography from 2011 to 2018 failed to pick it up at all.

The site was identified and excavated in work reported by Seán P. Ó Ríordáin and Máire MacDermott in 1949, who catalogued it as Ballingoola I, the southernmost of a pair of barrows whose centres stand just ten metres apart. What the excavation found was, in some respects, more interesting than what it did not find. There were no grave remains, no structural traces of any kind. What there was, concentrated near the centre and particularly in the south-east quadrant, was a spread of charcoal and burnt stone, including two dark hollows roughly 35 centimetres deep, packed with the same material. A small amount of coarse gritty pottery came from one of these hollows, along with a flint flake and some waste fragments of chert. Crucially, when trenches were cut to establish the relationship between these deposits and the ditch, it became clear that the ditch had been dug through the burnt material, meaning the burning pre-dates the barrow itself. Something happened on this ground before the monument was ever constructed.

The site lies in working farmland and the monument is, by all accounts, extremely subtle on the ground; the ditch was described at the time of excavation as having filled so rapidly that its contents were nearly indistinguishable from undisturbed clay, with only a dark humus band marking its outline in section. The outer bank survives only in fragments, most legible at the south and south-east. A second barrow lies four metres to the north, and the ground between them preserves a slight natural depression that mirrors the ancient river channel curving around the south of the site. Anyone drawn here by the 1949 publication should carry the sketch plan included in that report, since modern satellite imagery offers no guidance whatsoever.