The mound is roughly circular, measuring about twenty metres across, with a noticeably flattened top and what appears to be a ledge or step near its summit on the south-eastern side, wide enough to be conspicuous when seen in profile. Whether that stepped feature is an original element of the construction or the result of centuries of erosion, animal traffic, and ploughing is not entirely clear, though the surveyor David McGuinness, who examined it in 2015, considered it more likely to be original than a lower, circumferential ledge further down the slope. The south-eastern edge of the mound has been clipped by passing farm machinery, and poaching by livestock has worn away other parts of the circumference. No perimeter ditch, the defining feature of the bowl-barrow type, a burial mound encircled by a cut fosse, is visible around it, which led McGuinness to argue that the mound-barrow classification is more appropriate than the bowl-barrow label it had previously carried.

The mound sits on a glacial ridge, the kind of long, low landform left behind by retreating ice sheets, and its position is deliberate-feeling. Frewin Hill and Knockdrin, both prominent elevated landmarks carrying their own barrows, are visible to the east. Traces of an old field system survive to the north and west, and about two hundred metres downhill to the north lies a small natural lake that appears to be a kettle-hole, a depression formed when a buried block of glacial ice melted away. The wider landscape is dense with historical layering. Only 750 metres to the north-east is the burial ground and medieval parish church of Rathaspic, a place-name meaning "Rath of the Bishops", identified by the archaeologist Leo Swan in 1988 as an early medieval ecclesiastical site; the curving road pattern around it, he argued, preserves the line of a once-encircling curvilinear rampart or vallum. Close by is St Dermot's Well, still visited by pilgrims. Five hundred metres to the south-east stands a very large ringfort. The barrow, then, occupies a landscape that was clearly significant across several different periods, from prehistoric burial through early Christian settlement to living folk practice.