Circular, sod-covered, roughly seven metres across and just over a metre high, it is not especially dramatic to look at. Its top is uneven, its sides slope away gently, and at its south-east and south-west edges two small stone-built structures, roofed with lintels, lean against it like afterthoughts. Those additions are most likely the remains of animal shelters, and they are considered to post-date the mound itself. Whatever was built first, and why, remains an open question.

The mound's function is genuinely uncertain, which places it in a category that archaeology is more comfortable acknowledging than popular accounts of ancient sites tend to suggest. It may be prehistoric, it may be something more mundane. What is clear is that it does not stand alone. An enclosure sits roughly thirty metres to the south-east, and a hut site lies approximately a hundred and fifteen metres to the north-east. Taken together, these features suggest a landscape that was once organised and inhabited, even if the precise nature of that organisation is now lost. The Paps themselves have long associations with ceremonial and mythological significance in early Irish tradition, which gives any unexplained structure in the area a certain ambiguity: it might belong to that older, ritual landscape, or it might simply be the remnant of a working farm.