It sits in ordinary reclaimed pasture, enclosed by the drainage ditches of a nineteenth-century estate, and to the untrained eye it reads as almost nothing at all, a barely perceptible circular shadow in the grass. It is precisely this quality of near-invisibility that makes it interesting.

A ring barrow is a burial monument of prehistoric date, typically consisting of a low earthen mound enclosed by a circular ditch, known as a fosse, sometimes with an outer bank. This particular example, when surveyed by the Archaeological Survey of Ireland in 2007, measured roughly four metres across, defined by a fosse between 3.15 and 3.55 metres wide and just 0.25 metres deep, with traces of a levelled bank still just detectable. What survives has been further damaged by linear drainage channels cutting across the monument at its south-west and north-west edges. What is especially striking is that it does not sit alone. It belongs to a cluster of fourteen barrows concentrated in the southern half of Derk townland, with the nearest neighbour a mere fifteen metres to the east. Together they suggest that this gently rising ground, some 800 metres south-east of the summit of Derk Hill at 781 feet above sea level, was once a significant place for the living as well as the dead. The fields that now cover the area were enclosed and drained by the estate associated with Derk House, located around 650 metres to the north-east, activity that has left its mark on several of the monuments.

The monument's outline shows up as a faint cropmark on aerial orthophotographs taken between 2005 and 2012, and remains visible on a Google Earth image from November 2018, but it is the kind of thing that only registers once you know to look for it. The site lies approximately 220 metres west of the townland boundary with Knockderk. Visiting the barrow cluster in the drier summer months, when cropmarks are most readable from above, would give the best chance of understanding the wider grouping through satellite imagery beforehand. On the ground, expect subtlety rather than drama; the earthworks are heavily levelled, and the drainage cuts have truncated what little relief remains.