Roughly circular, about thirty to thirty-five metres across and three metres high, it rises with a gently domed profile and a slightly flattened top, its sides dropping away with unusual steepness and regularity. It sits above the eastern edge of a plateau where the ground falls sharply away, with Lough Mask visible roughly four hundred metres to the east and the mountains of Connemara visible further beyond. A stream skirts the western and northern sides of the plateau. The whole arrangement is, in its quiet way, rather odd.

What makes the mound genuinely puzzling is that its origins remain unresolved. It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1838 or 1929, and on the later twenty-five-inch plan it was marked simply as a natural feature, traced in dotted outline with hachuring, a cartographic convention for indicating slope or depression, on the south-eastern side where there is a shallow scoop or quarried area in the hillside. A loose heap of small and medium stones slumps from the edge of this depression to the base of the mound, likely the result of field clearance rather than any deliberate construction. Where erosion has exposed the interior, the mound proves to be composed of pale orange-brown boulder clay mixed with small stones and gravel, the kind of material deposited by glacial action. That might point to a wholly natural origin, a glacial landform shaped by ice-age processes. But the mound is remarkably compact and circular for something formed by chance, and the possibility that it is an artificial construction, perhaps a prehistoric burial mound or tumulus, cannot be ruled out. It was first formally noted by the Ballinrobe Survey in 1994, recorded as a tumulus, and it does not appear in the Record of Monuments and Places compiled in 1997, meaning it slipped past the official inventory entirely.