This particular ditch-barrow, a type of burial monument defined by a circular ditch cut around a central mound, sits in wet pasture roughly 310 metres north-east of the Morningstar River, which marks the boundary between the townlands of Elton and Ballinvana. It has never been excavated. What is known about it comes largely from the air.

The broader Elton barrow cemetery was first identified in 1982, not through a dedicated archaeological survey but as a by-product of infrastructure planning. The Archaeology Department of University College Cork was commissioned to carry out a Route Selection Study for Bórd Gáis Éireann, working in consultation with ARUP Pipeline Engineering. The resulting report, published under the name Woodman in 1983, flagged the area as archaeologically significant. Within a zone measuring roughly 230 metres north to south and 300 metres east to west, up to 37 possible barrows were recorded, of which this site forms one. In 1986, the Discovery Programme revisited the area using aerial images taken during a gas pipeline survey and a dedicated photographic survey of the Bruff region, designating this feature as Site No. 7 among the potential barrows. More recently, a cropmark consistent with a ditch-barrow became visible on a Digital Globe orthoimage captured between 2011 and 2013. Cropmarks appear when buried features affect how vegetation grows above them, leaving faint circular or linear traces readable from altitude.

The site is on private agricultural land, so access is not a given. The ground is notably wet, and the pasture setting means there is little to see at surface level without aerial imagery for reference. Those with a serious interest in the wider cemetery complex would do well to consult the national record held by the National Monuments Service, where the site carries reference numbers within the LI040-078 series. Aerial photographs, including the Bruff AP 2123 survey image, offer the clearest sense of the monument's form. Given the density of possible barrows in so compact an area, this corner of County Limerick quietly represents one of the more concentrated prehistoric funerary landscapes in the region, even if most of it remains beneath the grass, unexcavated and largely unvisited.