From the road, there is little to see. It took a set of medium-altitude aerial photographs, taken in 1986, to bring it properly into focus, revealing the characteristic circular form of a ring barrow, one of the ancient burial monument types that dot the Irish landscape in considerable but often unacknowledged numbers.

A ring barrow is, in its simplest form, a low mound enclosed by a surrounding ditch and an outer bank, typically associated with Bronze Age funerary practice. The monument at Rochestown was formally identified by The Discovery Programme, the Irish research body established to investigate the country's archaeological heritage, and entered into the record as part of the Ballyhoura Hills Project. That project, directed by archaeologist M. Doody, surveyed a broad swathe of landscape in the borderlands of Limerick, Cork, and Tipperary, making systematic use of aerial photography alongside fieldwork. The results were published in 2008 as Discovery Programme Monograph No. 7, a substantial regional study that documented dozens of previously unrecorded or poorly understood sites. The Rochestown barrow carries the reference LI023: Bruff 15901: AP 4/3696, placing it within the Bruff barony area of County Limerick.

Because the monument was identified through aerial photography rather than excavation, relatively little is known about what, if anything, lies beneath the surface. The cropmark or soilmark patterns that show up in aerial images of this kind reveal the buried geometry of a monument without telling you its date, its contents, or its condition. Visitors to the general area around Rochestown would be looking at ordinary farmland, and the site itself is not publicly marked or interpreted on the ground. The Ballyhoura Hills Project monograph, available through academic libraries, remains the most detailed published source for anyone wanting to understand the broader landscape context of the monument and the survey methods used to find it.