The ditch barrow near Elton, a type of earthen burial monument typically consisting of a central mound enclosed by a surrounding ditch and sometimes an outer bank, survives here not as a raised feature on the landscape but as a cropmark, a subtle difference in the colour and height of vegetation above ground that betrays the buried archaeology beneath. It sits in damp farmland roughly 365 metres north-east of the Morningstar River, which itself forms the boundary between the townlands of Elton and Ballinvana.

The site was not formally identified until 1982, when it came to light in an unlikely context. The Archaeology Department of University College Cork carried out a Route Selection Study for Bórd Gáis Éireann, working in consultation with ARUP Pipeline Engineering, and in the course of that survey the broader area was found to contain up to 37 possible barrows clustered within a compact zone measuring approximately 230 metres north to south and 300 metres east to west. The results were published the following year by Woodman in 1983. The Discovery Programme later returned to the area and listed this particular monument as Site No. 15 during examination of gas pipeline aerial photographs and a dedicated aerial photographic survey of the Bruff region in 1986. More recently, cropmark evidence for what appears to be the encircling ditch of the barrow was identified on Digital Globe orthoimagery captured between 2011 and 2013, confirming that something significant still lies beneath the surface here, even if the field itself gives little away to a visitor standing in it.

Access to the site itself is through private farmland, and the ground can be genuinely wet underfoot given its position in low-lying pasture near the Morningstar River. Because the monument is only clearly legible as a cropmark, there is no earthwork to examine at ground level in the conventional sense; what a visitor would actually see is an ordinary-looking field. The more productive approach is to consult the aerial imagery referenced in the archaeological record before visiting, so that the outline of the ditch can be held in mind when looking across the landscape. Summer visits, when crop and grass growth can accentuate differential soil moisture, offer the best conditions for any faint surface variation to be perceptible.