The site at Elton is not a dramatic hilltop monument or a well-signposted heritage park; it is wet pasture on a gentle ridge, with nothing on the surface to suggest that the ground beneath holds one of the more concentrated barrow cemeteries known in Ireland.

Barrows are earthen or stone-built mounds raised over prehistoric burials, typically dating to the Bronze Age, though the term covers a range of monument types. The Elton examples came to wider research attention through the work of the Discovery Programme, the state-funded body established to apply systematic survey methods to Irish archaeological landscapes. When the Programme examined aerial photography taken as part of the Bruff aerial photographic survey, this particular mound, recorded as Site No. 13, was flagged as a potential barrow. Subsequent work confirmed the wider picture. A topographic survey of the field identified sixteen barrows clearly visible as surface features, while a magnetometry survey, which detects sub-surface variation in the soil's magnetic properties, raised that count to twenty-two. The full cemetery, as recorded by Doody in 1999, comprises 28 barrows within a single field boundary. A faint cropmark, the kind of pale or dark mark that buried features sometimes leave in growing vegetation when seen from the air, was also noted on a Digital Globe orthoimage taken between 2011 and 2013, though no surface trace of this particular mound is visible on standard satellite imagery.

The field lies roughly 165 metres west of a watercourse that marks the townland boundary between Elton and Knocklong West. Access to the site itself is across private farmland, and there are no visitor facilities. The most informative way to appreciate the full extent of the cemetery is through the Discovery Programme's own published survey materials, including the topographic survey, magnetometry results, and digital terrain model, which together give a clearer sense of what the ground conceals than anything visible from the road.