No mound, no earthwork, no stone, no marker of any kind breaks the surface of the reclaimed pasture where a ditch barrow, a type of prehistoric burial monument defined by a circular ditch rather than a raised mound, is believed to lie. The only evidence that something is here at all is a faint ring visible from the air, the grass above an ancient buried feature growing fractionally differently from everything around it.

The site came to light not through any dedicated archaeological survey but as a by-product of infrastructure. In November 1984, aerial photographs taken as part of the Bórd Gáis Éireann Curraleigh West-to-Limerick gas pipeline survey, reference BGE 1/50000 2552, captured a small circular cropmark in the fields at Ballincolloo. Cropmarks form when buried features, ditches, pits, or foundations, affect how crops or grass grow above them; a filled-in ditch, for instance, retains moisture differently from undisturbed soil, producing a subtly greener or faster-growing stripe that becomes legible from altitude in dry conditions. This particular mark was assigned Site No. 040240 and recorded accordingly. Subsequent aerial photography by the Archaeological Survey of Ireland in January 2003 added further documentation. By the time Ordnance Survey Ireland ortho-photography was examined for the period 2005 to 2012, no surface trace remained visible at ground level, and the feature does not appear on any OSi historic mapping. A Google Earth image from March 2017 showed only a faint echo of the original cropmark. An enclosure of a different type lies roughly 110 metres to the north-west, suggesting the broader landscape here may hold more than its unremarkable surface implies. The record was compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded to the Sites and Monuments Record in April 2021.

For anyone curious enough to visit the general area, the site sits in ordinary agricultural land and there is genuinely nothing to observe on foot. The cropmark, when it appears at all, is only legible from altitude and only under the right conditions of soil moisture and growth. What the visit does offer is a useful recalibration of how archaeology actually works in Ireland; a great deal of what is known about the country's prehistoric landscape was recorded not by excavation but by people examining photographs taken for entirely unrelated reasons, pipelines, roads, drainage schemes, and noticing that the fields below contained ghosts.