The ring-barrow at Gortaclareen never made it onto the historic Ordnance Survey Ireland maps, meaning it passed unrecorded through the era when so many comparable monuments across the country were first formally noted. That omission makes its eventual identification all the more interesting.

A ring-barrow is a burial monument of prehistoric origin, typically consisting of a central mound covering human remains, encircled by a ditch and an outer bank. The Gortaclareen example fits that pattern closely. It came to light during the Bruff aerial photographic survey in 1986, catalogued as Bruff 18 (AP 4/3622), when the circular cropmark became legible from the air. The monument has an external diameter of approximately 17 metres, with a central low mound defined by a fosse, the encircling ditch, around 2 metres wide, and an outer bank roughly 3 metres in width. On the ground, these features are subtle enough to read as nothing more than a slight rise and fall in an ordinary field. The site lies on flat pasture, around 200 metres east-south-east of a nearby enclosure recorded separately in the Sites and Monuments Record, and approximately 330 metres south-east of the townland boundary with Newtown North. Subsequent orthoimages, including OSi aerial photography from between 2005 and 2012, Digital Globe imagery from 2011 to 2013, and a Google Earth capture dated 18 November 2018, have all confirmed the monument remains visible and largely intact. The record was compiled by Edmond O'Donovan and uploaded to the national record in September 2020.

The site is on private agricultural land, so access would require the landowner's permission. Because the monument is so slight at ground level, aerial or satellite imagery is genuinely the most rewarding way to appreciate its form; the concentric rings of mound, ditch, and bank that are nearly invisible underfoot resolve clearly in overhead views. Google Earth's historical imagery layer, which retains the 2018 capture, gives a reasonable sense of the structure. Visitors to the broader area who have an interest in early medieval or prehistoric landscape should also note the nearby enclosure to the north-west, which suggests this corner of County Limerick supported a degree of settled or ceremonial activity across a long period.