Roughly 25 metres in diameter and still rising to between one and two metres in height, it occupies the centre of a hillfort, and the combination of its location and construction has kept archaeologists quietly arguing about its origins for decades. Six kerb-stones remain exposed along its western side, and the question of what tradition it actually belongs to, passage tomb or something older and stranger, is still not fully resolved.

When a clergyman named Graves investigated the monument in 1851, he found a central chamber roughly two metres long and just over a metre wide, its eastern and western walls built from large slabs stacked one upon another, its southern end closed by a single upright stone, and its northern end filled in with smaller stones placed without apparent order. Two roof flags, each around 1.5 metres long, had been displaced and lay inside the chamber. Within the fill were two adult human skeletons, apparently extended, both laid with their heads to the south. About two metres to the south of this chamber, set at a noticeably higher level in the cairn, Graves also found a small cist, a simple stone-lined box burial, containing cremated bone and pottery sherds decorated with an indented herring-bone or zig-zag pattern, probably from a food vessel or urn. The combination of features is unusual. A Linkardstown-type burial, as one classification suggests, would place it in a tradition of single inhumations within round cairns dating to the later Neolithic. Yet the central megalithic chamber, the kerbed round cairn, and the prominent hilltop position all carry echoes of the passage-tomb tradition, in which communities constructed elaborately chambered mounds, often on high ground, as monuments to their dead. Both the cist and the southern end-stone of the main chamber are still visible at the site today.