It exists primarily as a cropmark, a faint circular signature left in the grass above its buried form, detectable from the air but not reliably from the ground. A ring barrow, in general terms, is a low circular earthwork, typically consisting of a mound or flat area enclosed by a ditch and bank, associated with Bronze Age burial practice across Ireland and Britain. This one, sitting in low-lying pasture at Ballyphilip, measures roughly nine metres east-northeast to west-southwest and eight and a half metres northwest to southeast, making it a small example even by the modest standards of the type.

The monument came to notice not through excavation or ground survey but through aerial photography. The Bruff aerial photographic survey of 1986 identified it as a small circular cropmark, recorded under reference Bruff 15705 (AP 4/3665). Cropmarks form when buried features alter how vegetation grows above them, and they tend to show most clearly during dry summers when differential moisture retention becomes visible from above. The site lies within what the records describe as a large complex of ring barrows, suggesting the surrounding landscape was once a significant funerary zone, though the individual monuments within it have left little trace on the surface today. Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly compiled the current record, uploaded in September 2020, noting that while the cropmark was still legible on Ordnance Survey orthoimagery captured between 2005 and 2012, it had become invisible again on a Google Earth image taken in March 2017.

The field itself is wet and cut through with land drains and watercourses, which means access is difficult and the ground underfoot unreliable, particularly in winter and spring. There is, practically speaking, nothing to see on the surface; the monument does not project above the pasture, and without aerial imagery for reference it would be indistinguishable from the surrounding grassland. The interest here lies less in what a visitor might observe directly and more in what the aerial record reveals: that a quietly significant prehistoric landscape is slowly becoming unreadable, its features flickering in and out of visibility depending on rainfall, satellite schedules, and the patience of researchers studying images taken years apart.