Measuring approximately 7.5 metres north to south and 8 metres east to west, the cairn sits highest at its upslope southern end, reaching about a metre in height, and slopes downward to the north in a way that simply mirrors the natural fall of the ridge beneath it. Its top is flat rather than domed, and much of the surface is partly moss-covered. Crucially, it does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of either 1837 or 1919, which suggests it either escaped notice at both surveys or came into existence after the earlier one. It was only formally recorded in the 1990s, identified from aerial photography rather than ground survey. The current assessment is that it has the appearance of a field clearance cairn, the kind of practical accumulation that results when farmers gather surface stones to make grazing land workable, rather than a monument with any ceremonial or funerary origin.

What gives the site a degree of additional interest is its proximity to features that are almost certainly much older. About 150 metres to the south-west, on the actual summit of the ridge, sit two bowl barrows. A bowl barrow is a type of prehistoric burial mound, typically Bronze Age, consisting of a rounded earthen or stone mound often surrounded by a ditch. Their presence so close to the cairn does not change what the cairn itself appears to be, but it does place an otherwise unremarkable pile of stones in a landscape that was clearly meaningful to people at some earlier point. Whether the cairn was piled up by a farmer who had no particular awareness of those older monuments nearby, or on ground that had been in use and noticed for a very long time, is the kind of question the stones themselves cannot answer.