A cairn is simply a mound of stones, typically raised over a burial or as a territorial marker, and this one is substantial enough to have absorbed the landscape around it rather than merely sitting within it. Measuring roughly 16.5 metres north to south and 16.8 metres east to west, and standing 1.8 metres high, it is a considerable construction, built largely from medium-sized stone blocks with some quartz worked into the pile. Quartz was used repeatedly in prehistoric funerary monuments across Ireland, most famously at Newgrange, though whether its presence here was decorative, symbolic, or simply practical is not recorded.

What makes this particular monument quietly strange is the way later activity has layered itself onto it. A sheepfold was built directly into the northern edge of the cairn, its southern end incorporating a large stone slab measuring nearly two metres in length. Just beside that slab, in the surface of the cairn itself, sits a large, shallow, circular depression whose origin is not explained. It may be the result of earlier excavation or disturbance, or it may be a natural settling of the mound over time. Running along the eastern side of the cairn is a 30-metre stretch of what is known as a pre-bog wall, a field boundary or enclosure wall that predates the growth of the peat bog around it, and which therefore hints at a landscape that was once open farmland before blanket bog gradually swallowed the terrain. The wall abuts the cairn rather than cutting through it, suggesting the two features were understood, at some point, to belong together or at least to require a degree of mutual accommodation.