The Ordnance Survey's first edition six-inch map recorded a raised circular earthwork at Ballynamona, roughly 37 metres in diameter, its outline defined by a scarp, the term used for the steep face of an earthen bank or ridge that marks the edge of a raised feature. By the time the surveyors returned to revise their maps before 1897, it was gone. The ground had been levelled, absorbed into the agricultural landscape around it, and no subsequent mapping has recorded it since.

What exactly the earthwork was remains uncertain, since so little survived long enough to be properly examined. Its circular, raised form is broadly consistent with a number of prehistoric monument types found across Ireland, and its proximity to a barrow cemetery lying approximately 140 metres to the south-east is suggestive of a wider funerary or ceremonial landscape in this part of Limerick. Barrows are burial mounds, typically of Bronze Age date, and they are often found in clusters rather than in isolation. Whether the Ballynamona earthwork was itself a barrow, an enclosure, or something else entirely, the window for knowing closed sometime between those two map surveys in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the land was brought into more intensive agricultural use.

For anyone curious enough to visit, the site sits roughly 115 metres east of a stream in what is now ordinary grazing land. Aerial and satellite imagery reviewed between 2011 and 2013 shows no surface trace of the earthwork whatsoever, and more recent Google Earth imagery confirms the same. There is nothing to see in the conventional sense. The interest lies precisely in that absence, in standing in a field that the 1840 map insists was once marked by something circular and deliberate, and finding only grass. The neighbouring barrow cemetery to the south-east remains a registered monument and provides at least some visible context for what this corner of Limerick once held.