That name alone sets this place apart. The boulders appear on the Ordnance Survey's 1912 twenty-five-inch map with that collective designation, and a sixth stone, not recorded on any map, was found during a later site visit. A seventh features in a local legend, much of it set at this very spot.

The mound itself is a substantial piece of earthwork: roughly 21 metres across at the base, 2.8 metres high, and flat enough at the summit to form a small, roughly level platform measuring about 5 by 4 metres. Around it runs a fosse, the term for a defensive or enclosing ditch, nearly 4 metres wide, with a bank of earth and stone at its outer edge rising to about a metre. This kind of arrangement, a raised mound with a surrounding ditch and bank, is characteristic of a motte, a form of medieval earthwork fortification. The "moat" of the place name likely reflects that tradition. The legend associated with the stones was recorded by the antiquarian W. G. Wood-Martin in the late 1880s, suggesting the folklore was well established even then, though the stones themselves tell a more ambiguous story: there is no evidence that any of them were ever upright, which means they were almost certainly never a formal standing-stone monument in the archaeological sense, whatever local tradition chose to call them.

The boulders are recumbent and irregularly shaped, more suggestive of natural glacial deposition than of deliberate human arrangement, yet they accumulated a mermaid legend substantial enough to earn a named entry on an Ordnance Survey map. That combination, a medieval earthwork, a cluster of unremarkable stones, and a folklore tradition vivid enough to outlast generations, is what gives Scurmore Moat its quietly peculiar character.