The ground is wet pasture, unremarkable to the eye, and the mounds are either so low or so thoroughly absorbed back into the earth that most leave no visible trace at the surface. What lies beneath is something else entirely: up to 28 barrows, the earthen burial mounds raised by prehistoric communities to inter their dead, clustered together in what archaeologists formally record as the Elton barrow cemetery.

The site was documented by Doody in 1999, who recorded the cemetery as a whole. The Discovery Programme, a state-funded body established to apply scientific methods to Irish archaeology, subsequently examined the field using multiple survey techniques. A topographic survey of the site revealed sixteen barrows clearly enough to map on the ground. A magnetometry survey, which reads subtle variations in the soil's magnetic properties to detect buried features without excavation, pushed that count to twenty-two. The particular barrow recorded as Site No. 17 sits on a low ridge roughly 165 metres west of a watercourse that marks the townland boundary with Knocklong West. It was initially flagged as a potential barrow through analysis of aerial photography taken as part of the Bruff aerial photographic survey, and a faint cropmark, the kind of ghostly impression a buried monument can leave in growing vegetation when viewed from above, was noted on satellite imagery captured between 2011 and 2013. On standard Google Earth images, nothing is visible at all.

Because there are no surface remains to speak of, a visit to the broader Elton area rewards those who come prepared with the Discovery Programme's published surveys rather than those expecting obvious mounds. The field sits in ordinary agricultural land, and access would depend on landowner permission. The magnetometry and topographic surveys, along with a Digital Terrain Model of the cemetery produced by the Discovery Programme, are the most useful tools for understanding what the landscape actually contains, and they are available through the Discovery Programme's own image archive. The gap between what the ground shows and what the surveys reveal is, in its own way, the most interesting thing about the place.