It is a barrow, a prehistoric burial mound, measuring twelve metres across and enclosed by an earthen bank that rises only modestly above the surrounding ground. The bank itself is between 2.3 and 2.7 metres wide, with an internal height of just twenty to thirty centimetres and an external height of around sixty centimetres. That subtle difference in elevation is often all that survives of these monuments after millennia of agriculture, weather, and gradual subsidence.

What gives this particular barrow an additional layer of interest is a detail preserved on the 1913 Ordnance Survey six-inch map: at that point, the mound sat within an oblong tree plantation. Landowners in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sometimes planted around or over prehistoric earthworks, whether to ornament a demesne, to use otherwise awkward ground, or simply by coincidence. The plantation itself has evidently gone, but its former presence on the map offers a small, telling glimpse into how the site was treated within living memory of people now long dead. The Moy Estuary, which the rise overlooks, marks the boundary between Sligo and Mayo, a stretch of water with its own long record of human settlement and movement.