It is a ditch-barrow, a funerary monument type in which a low central mound is defined not by an earthen bank but by a surrounding fosse, the term used for a shallow ditched channel cut into the soil. Here, that fosse is roughly 1.2 metres wide and only about 10 centimetres deep, and the enclosed interior rises in a gentle dome shape across an area measuring approximately 2.75 metres north to south and 3 metres east to west. It is a modest thing by any measure, the kind of monument that rewards attention rather than announces itself.

What makes the setting quietly interesting is its relationship to the surrounding landscape. The barrow lies on the exterior of a neighbouring enclosure, which may suggest that this part of Rathcoun was, at some point in the prehistoric past, an area with layered and overlapping uses, where the living organised their space alongside memorials to the dead. Two further ditch-barrows lie nearby, one approximately 5.5 metres to the west and another around 9 metres to the east, forming a loose cluster of related monuments in the same field. Such groupings are not uncommon in the Irish midlands and south, where burial monuments were sometimes placed in loose association with one another over generations, accumulating meaning in a particular patch of ground.