It is easy to mistake for a natural rise in the ground, but its roughly circular outline, measuring around nine metres north to south and eight metres east to west, and the shallow ditch that curves around its northern arc, mark it out as something deliberately made and very old. This is a ditch barrow, a type of prehistoric burial monument defined by a low earthen mound enclosed by an external fosse, that is, a surrounding ditch cut into the ground, which in this case remains faintly but distinctly visible across the north-western to north-eastern arc of the monument.

Barrows of this kind belong broadly to the Bronze Age tradition of monument-building in Ireland, when the dead were commemorated and interred beneath carefully constructed earthen mounds, often placed in visible or significant positions in the landscape. The mound at Rathgallen has a flat top and tilts slightly downslope toward the east. Its defining scarp, the low step of earth that gives the mound its edge, rises to around half a metre in height. The external fosse, where it survives, is roughly five metres wide and less than half a metre deep. A curvilinear depression extends from the eastern base of the mound in a south-easterly arc, possibly a further remnant of the original surrounding feature. The monument has not escaped entirely unaltered: an established hedgerow field boundary clips its southern edge, and an electric fence crosses the western sector. Neither intrusion is unusual for a monument that has been quietly absorbed into agricultural land over centuries. About 135 metres to the north-east lies a ringfort, a circular enclosed settlement of the early medieval period, a reminder that this corner of Tipperary was in use across multiple successive periods, each generation leaving its own mark on the same modest slope.