It is easy to miss, and for most of the twentieth century, it very nearly was missed entirely. The feature appears on just one historical map, the Ordnance Survey six-inch sheet from 1937, recorded as a linear mound oriented roughly east-north-east to west-south-west. After that, it drops out of the cartographic record. On the ground today, the evidence is modest: a slight rise in the terrain, the kind of gentle undulation that might be attributed to natural variation in the land if you did not know to look for it.

Linear mounds are an intriguing category in Irish archaeology precisely because they resist easy classification. Unlike the more familiar circular burial mounds, a long or linear mound can belong to several different traditions, from prehistoric funerary monuments to later agricultural or boundary features. Without excavation, the Rowls example remains unassigned to any particular period or function. Its appearance on the 1937 map but not on earlier or later surveys raises questions about whether it was more visible at mid-century, perhaps after ploughing or drainage work disturbed the surrounding ground, or whether earlier surveyors simply did not record it. The orientation along an ENE-WSW axis is a detail that specialists note but that, on its own, explains little.