It does not appear on any Ordnance Survey Ireland historic maps, and it remained unrecorded until aerial observation brought it into focus. That absence from official cartography is part of what makes it interesting: the landscape here kept its secret simply by being ordinary.

A barrow is a burial mound of prehistoric origin, and a ditch barrow is a variant defined by a surrounding ditch or ring-ditch cut into the earth around the central mound. The Coolalough example was first identified from a McCloud aerial photograph and was formally described by archaeologists Sarah Cross and Eoin Grogan in 1994, during fieldwork carried out under Licence No. 94E0172. Their notes recorded it as a previously unrecorded ring-ditch, measuring 7 metres north to south and 6 metres east to west, with a central mound 3.6 metres in diameter and roughly 0.3 metres high. A bowl barrow, a rounded mound type also of prehistoric date, lies approximately 65 metres to the southwest, suggesting this stretch of Limerick pasture once held more ceremonial or funerary significance than its present agricultural state implies. As recently as September 2020, a faint cropmark trace, the kind of subtle discolouration in vegetation that reveals buried features during dry conditions, was visible on a Google Earth orthoimage of the site.

The site sits in reclaimed pasture immediately north of a field drain running northeast to southwest, which helps orient a visitor on the ground, though there is little to see with the naked eye at surface level. The mound's modest height means it can easily be mistaken for a natural undulation in the field. The cropmark evidence suggests the buried ditch is more legible from the air than from ground level, particularly in dry summers when soil moisture differences become visible through changes in crop or grass growth. Anyone with an interest in how aerial photography continues to reshape our understanding of the Irish prehistoric landscape will find the documentation of this site, compiled by Martin Fitzpatrick and uploaded in July 2021, a useful illustration of how much remains to be mapped.