The feature, roughly sixteen metres in diameter and defined by a surrounding ditch, showed up in Digital Globe orthoimages taken sometime between 2011 and 2013. It has no paper file, no archive record to consult, and no formal investigation behind it. It is, in the most literal sense, a shape in a field that someone noticed from above.

The earthwork is a barrow, a burial mound or funerary monument of the kind found across Ireland in varying states of preservation, some dramatically raised and grassed over, others reduced to little more than a cropmark or a shadow in damp ground. This one falls into the latter category. What makes its location quietly interesting is its proximity to a motte and bailey castle, a type of early medieval fortification introduced to Ireland by the Normans, consisting of a raised earthen mound, the motte, adjoined by an enclosed courtyard, the bailey. That castle sits approximately seventy metres to the north-west. The pairing is not unusual in the Irish landscape; Norman settlers frequently built near or over earlier features, whether deliberately or simply because elevated or cleared ground attracted successive generations for their own reasons. Whether any relationship exists between the barrow and the castle here is unknown.

The grassland around the site is described as poorly drained, which may partly explain why the ditch remains legible in aerial imaging. Waterlogged ground tends to preserve earthworks that might otherwise be ploughed or eroded away, holding the faint geometry of old features just below the surface of an otherwise unremarkable field.