That invisibility is, in its own way, the most striking thing about the Elton barrow cemetery. Twenty-eight barrows, a barrow being a mounded earthen burial monument typically raised over one or more prehistoric interments, have been recorded within its boundaries. Most leave no trace that the naked eye can catch from the ground.

The site came to wider archaeological attention through the work of the Discovery Programme, a State-funded body established to bring systematic survey methods to Ireland's archaeological heritage. Aerial photography of the Bruff area first flagged this particular mound, recorded as Site No. 23, as a potential barrow. Subsequent investigation of the whole field through a topographic survey made sixteen barrows clearly visible as subtle variations in ground level. A magnetometry survey, which detects differences in the magnetic properties of subsurface material without breaking the ground, pushed that number to twenty-two. The full tally of twenty-eight was recorded by researcher Doody in 1999. A faint cropmark, the kind of shadow that buried features sometimes cast on growing vegetation, appeared on a Digital Globe orthoimage taken sometime between 2011 and 2013, but later Google Earth imagery showed no surface remains whatsoever. The field sits on a low ridge about 130 metres west of a watercourse that marks the townland boundary with Knocklong West.

This particular ditch barrow sits within that same field, in wet pasture that discourages casual exploration in wetter months. Visitors with a serious interest would do well to consult the Discovery Programme's published topographic survey, magnetometry results, and digital terrain model, all of which number and map the individual sites within the cemetery. There is nothing to see in the conventional sense; the value here is conceptual, the knowledge that beneath an ordinary-looking field lies a community of the prehistoric dead, their monuments reduced to magnetic whispers in the soil.