It measures nearly 23 metres east to west and rises to a height of about two and a half metres, which is substantial for a cairn of this kind. What makes it quietly odd is the evidence of interference: stones have been taken from the northern half and used to construct four small shelters within the southern half of the mound itself. Someone, at some unknown point, effectively cannibalised part of a prehistoric monument to make windbreaks, possibly for shepherds or for anyone else who needed brief cover on an exposed summit.

The cairn sits within a wider prehistoric landscape that is unusually dense even by Irish standards. A megalithic tomb lies just 112 metres to the south-west. A wedge tomb, a type of megalithic burial monument typically dating to the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age, stands close enough that one of its associated stones, triangular in shape, has a near-match on the Sheegouna cairn itself: a small pyramidal stone, only 35 centimetres high and 75 centimetres wide, positioned 12 metres due north of the cairn. Whether this correspondence is coincidental or meaningful is not clear, but it is the kind of detail that tends to nag. Further cairns sit on Knockahunna and Slievenamon, each roughly a kilometre away, and the passage tombs at Knockroe and Baunfree in Co. Kilkenny lie within 13 kilometres to the east and north-east. Passage tombs are among the more elaborate megalithic monument types, involving a stone-lined corridor leading to a burial chamber, and their proximity here suggests this part of the Tipperary and Kilkenny uplands was a place of considerable ceremonial significance across a long stretch of prehistory.

The summit approach crosses open moorland, and the bilberry bushes that fringe the cairn give it a softer outline than the bare limestone beneath. The four shelters built into the southern half are still visible as low settings of stone, small enough that they read almost as afterthoughts against the scale of the original mound.