Sitting in rough pasture above a poorly drained hollow in Lissobihane, County Tipperary, this ring barrow is one of several prehistoric burial monuments clustered within a short distance of each other, suggesting that whoever chose this unremarkable-looking ground saw something in it worth returning to, again and again, over a very long time. A ring barrow is a circular burial mound defined by a surrounding ditch and sometimes an outer bank, the whole thing acting as a formal boundary between the world of the living and whatever lay interred within.

This particular example is modest in its dimensions, measuring roughly 3.15 metres north to south and 3.3 metres east to west, its circular form defined by a shallow fosse, that is, a ditch, just over a metre and a half wide and barely three centimetres deep at the time of survey. What remains of an outer bank runs along the western to south-eastern arc, low but still legible. The interior sits around seven centimetres below the level of the surrounding ground, a subtle depression that would be easy to miss underfoot. A poorly defined mound adjoining to the north-west hints that this may once have formed a conjoined barrow, two burial monuments sharing a common boundary or touching edge to edge, a pairing that would place it in the same category as two confirmed conjoined ditch barrows located just seven metres to the south-east. A further ditch barrow lies around fifty-two metres to the north-east. The site was identified during field survey by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly on 9 December 2008.

The most vivid detail the site offers is botanical rather than archaeological. In the southern quadrant, wild irises have taken hold along the line of the fosse, their roots evidently finding the slight extra moisture of the old ditch congenial. In late spring and early summer, they trace the prehistoric boundary in yellow, marking a burial enclosure that is otherwise almost invisible against the surrounding pasture.