Others reveal themselves only from the air, as a faint circular shadow pressed into the soil, visible for a moment under the right conditions and then gone again. A ring barrow near Ballybricken in County Limerick belongs to this second category. A ring barrow is a type of prehistoric burial monument, typically consisting of a low central mound enclosed by a circular ditch and sometimes an outer bank, and this one left no trace obvious enough to attract attention at ground level. It took a camera mounted in an aircraft to find it at all.

The monument was identified by The Discovery Programme, an Irish archaeological research body, using medium-altitude aerial photographs taken in 1986. The discovery was subsequently written up by M. Doody in the 2008 publication The Ballyhoura Hills Project, a Discovery Programme Monograph issued by Wordwell, which examined the archaeology of the wider Ballyhoura landscape across parts of Limerick and the surrounding region. The site carries the reference LI023: Bruff 17003: AP 4/3710, a cataloguing designation that places it within the Bruff area of County Limerick. Beyond those details, the record is spare. No excavation data accompanies it, no finds are listed, and the precise date of construction remains unestablished, as is often the case with cropmark sites of this kind.

Because the monument was identified through aerial photography rather than fieldwork, there is no guarantee of anything visible on the ground today. Cropmarks of this sort appear when buried ditches or banks affect how overlying vegetation grows, producing tonal differences detectable from above, particularly in dry summers when soil moisture varies sharply over disturbed ground. A visitor to the Ballybricken area should not expect a raised mound or a clearly defined earthwork. The landscape here is agricultural, and the feature almost certainly lies within or alongside farmed land. Access would depend on landowner permission, and the site itself may be entirely unmarked. For anyone interested in the archaeology of the Ballyhoura region more broadly, Doody's 2008 monograph remains the most systematic treatment of what the aerial survey programme uncovered across this part of Limerick.