The sunken interior, a depression about half a metre deep at the centre of the mound, has been gradually filled in by hill-walkers leaving stones behind, a modern habit that inadvertently echoes the ancient act of raising the cairn in the first place. The result is a monument in a slow state of reinvention, its original profile difficult to read beneath decades of heather growth and informal addition.

The cairn itself is a roughly circular mound, nearly eighteen metres across at its base and varying in height from just under a quarter of a metre to over a metre and a half. A cairn of this type, a deliberate accumulation of stones over a burial or as a territorial or ceremonial marker, is a familiar feature of Irish upland summits, typically dating to the Bronze Age, though no excavation record is available here to confirm that. What distinguishes this one is its material: the stones are red sandstone with quartz inclusions, the local geology of the Galtees surfacing directly in the monument's fabric. Nearby outcrop gives some sense of the raw landscape from which those stones came. A trigonometrical station, the concrete pillar used by Ordnance Survey teams to fix precise ground positions, occupies the south-western quadrant of the cairn, and a modern rubble stone shelter sits just to the north-east, built by walkers seeking cover from the wind.