The ground is wet pasture on a low ridge, unremarkable to the eye, with a small watercourse running along the eastern edge marking the boundary with the neighbouring townland of Knocklong West. Beneath and within that ordinary-looking field, however, archaeologists have recorded a cemetery of 28 barrows, the collective term for prehistoric burial mounds, typically circular earthen or stone structures raised over the remains of the dead. This particular example, catalogued as Site No. 15, is one ditch barrow among nearly three dozen, and it sits roughly 155 metres west of that boundary stream.

The scale of what has been identified at Elton came into focus gradually, and largely through remote-sensing work rather than excavation. The site was first flagged by the Discovery Programme, the State-funded archaeological research body, after analysis of aerial photographs from the Bruff survey identified it as a potential barrow. A subsequent topographic survey of the field made sixteen barrows clearly visible on the ground surface. A magnetometry survey of the same area, which detects buried features by measuring variations in the soil's magnetic properties, pushed that number to twenty-two. The full tally of 28 is drawn from the broader body of survey work compiled by researchers including Martin Doody, whose 1999 report documented the cemetery. A faint cropmark, the ghostly outline that buried features can produce in vegetation under dry conditions, was also noted on satellite imagery taken between 2011 and 2013, though no surface remains are visible on more recent Google Earth images.

Access to a field of wet pasture in active agricultural use is not guaranteed, and there is little to see at ground level without specialist survey data to hand. The site is best understood through the Discovery Programme's published surveys, including their topographic plan and Digital Terrain Model, which map the individual barrows within the cemetery and give a sense of the density of prehistoric activity concentrated in this one corner of County Limerick. For anyone researching the area, the magnetometry and topographic surveys are available through the Discovery Programme's image archive and offer a more legible picture of the landscape than a visit to the field itself is likely to provide.