This ring-barrow in the townland of Cross, in the Coonagh barony of County Limerick, survives not as an earthwork you can walk up to and touch, but as a cropmark, a ghostly circular impression that appears in aerial imagery under the right conditions and then vanishes again. A ring-barrow, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a prehistoric burial mound enclosed by a surrounding ditch or bank, typically dating to the Bronze Age, and the circular form that shows up in crops or pasture grasses above the site is caused by the differential growth of vegetation over buried soil disturbance.

The site was first identified during the Bruff aerial photographic survey in 1986, when it appeared as a small circular cropmark in survey image Bruff 106 (1), reference AP 4/3676. It sits on a north-facing slope in pasture, 87 metres south-east of the Reask River, which forms the townland boundary with Brackyle, and 105 metres east of the boundary with Knockballyfookeen. Far from being an isolated find, it is the westernmost of a cluster of five ring-barrows in the area, catalogued under references LI024-171002 through LI024-171005. Within roughly 300 metres there are also a possible enclosure, three further barrows, a separate enclosure, and an earthwork, suggesting this corner of County Limerick was, at some prehistoric point, a place of considerable ceremonial or funerary significance. A faint trace of the cropmark was still detectable on an Ordnance Survey Ireland orthophoto taken between 2005 and 2012, but by the time a Google Earth image was captured on 18 November 2018, nothing was visible at all.

Because this site exists primarily as a cropmark rather than an upstanding monument, there is little to see on a casual visit to the field itself. The ground shows no obvious mounding, and the circular form only reveals itself from the air and only under specific conditions of soil moisture and crop stress, typically during a dry summer when buried features affect surface vegetation. Anyone with a serious interest in the wider monument cluster would do better to consult the Bruff survey archive and the National Monuments Service records, which log the full constellation of barrows and enclosures in the area. The records were compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded in July 2020, and they give a useful overview of how densely this landscape was once used.