A burnt mound lying in low-lying ground that slopes southward towards marshy terrain, it sat entirely invisible until April 2016, when a forestry trench cut through the soil and exposed what had been hiding around 35 centimetres below the surface: a layer of burnt stone and charcoal stretching roughly 11 metres from north-east to south-west, between 30 and 35 centimetres deep.

Burnt mounds are among the most common prehistoric monuments in Ireland, yet they remain genuinely enigmatic. They are typically composed of fire-cracked stones and charcoal, deposited near a water source, and are generally interpreted as the debris from a process involving heating stones and plunging them into water-filled troughs, possibly for cooking, bathing, or industrial purposes. The Callow example fits the pattern closely: a stream runs approximately 13 metres to the north-west, and marshy ground lies to the south, placing the site in exactly the kind of waterlogged, low-lying landscape where these monuments are most often found. The discovery came about not through any planned excavation but through routine archaeological monitoring of a private forestry plantation, the kind of watching brief that often turns out to be the only reason such sites come to light at all. Consultant archaeologist Angela Wallace reported the find in May 2016. With no surface trace whatsoever, the mound had simply been grass and pasture until the machinery moved in.

Once identified, the area was excluded from planting to protect the monument, meaning the trees now grow around a gap that marks something genuinely old beneath the ground. There is no visitor infrastructure, no marker, and the site sits within a working forestry plantation on private land.