The site passed unnoticed through successive Ordnance Survey Ireland mapping campaigns, invisible on the ground because centuries of agricultural improvement had smoothed the land into ordinary-looking pasture. What finally gave the monuments away was not excavation or fieldwork, but a shadow, or more precisely, the differential growth of crops above buried features.

The barrows, or at least eight possible examples of them, are concentrated within a single large field measuring roughly 125 metres north to south and 175 metres east to west. A ring-barrow is a circular burial monument, typically of Bronze Age date, consisting of a mound or pit surrounded by a ditch and sometimes an outer bank. Their presence at Garrydoolis was first identified during a 1986 aerial photographic survey carried out in the Bruff area, when the relevant image, catalogued as Bruff 122.04, revealed the characteristic circular form of one monument. Cropmarks, the faint variations in vegetation colour and height that appear above buried ditches or banks, later confirmed the site on Ordnance Survey orthophotography taken between 2005 and 2012, and again on a Google Earth image dated 18 November 2018. The record was compiled by Martin Fitzpatrick and uploaded in April 2021.

There is nothing to see at ground level in the conventional sense. The field sits 145 metres west of the townland boundary, flanked on the east by a relict field boundary running north to south, and to the south by field drains running east to west, both of which show up on aerial imagery alongside the barrow cropmarks. Visiting the area on the ground means walking improved grassland with no visible surface monument; the real detail only resolves itself when you look at the aerial record. The Bruff aerial image and the more recent orthophotos, referenced in the National Monuments Service database under LI033-115001 to 008, give a clearer sense of what lies beneath a seemingly unremarkable Limerick pasture.