The ditch, roughly a metre to a metre and a half wide and up to 0.8 metres deep, has sliced into the cairn at some point in its post-prehistoric life, reducing what was once a more complete structure to something irregular and overgrown. That kind of casual truncation is not unusual for ancient monuments in agricultural land, but it does make this one harder to read at a glance.

The cairn was identified in 1996 by Tom Coffey, sitting within what appears to be a large multiperiod field system, meaning layers of human land use accumulated over many centuries, possibly millennia, are legible in the surrounding landscape. A cairn, in its simplest form, is a deliberate accumulation of stones, often raised over a burial or used as a marker in the prehistoric period. This one measures approximately 13 metres north to south and 8 metres east to west, with a height that varies considerably, from 0.4 metres to 1.4 metres, partly because of the digging activity that has exposed its internal makeup of stone and earth. Several stones set on edge survive at the eastern and south-eastern sides, which may hint at some form of structural intention in the original construction. The slope it occupies is described as semi-karst, a reference to the partially dissolved limestone terrain characteristic of much of County Clare, where thin soils overlie fractured rock and the land has a tendency to feel ancient even before you start looking closely.