What makes it odd is not just its age, but its layering of purposes: a feature that was probably prehistoric in origin, then groomed and terraced in the post-1700 period, and later pressed into service by the Ordnance Survey as a trigonometrical station. The result is something that looks almost designed, because to a significant degree it was, though not all at once and not by any single hand.

The mound is most likely a bell-barrow or stepped-barrow, a prehistoric burial monument type defined by a raised central mound separated from a surrounding bank by a flat platform called a berm. Here, the fosse, the ditch encircling the mound, appears to have been re-cut and deepened at some point after 1700, and a spiral step pathway was cut into the mound from the north-north-east, curving up to its summit. A causewayed entrance on the north side is also considered a post-1700 addition. Whether this reshaping was purely ornamental, perhaps connected to landscaping on a nearby estate, or whether it was the work of Ordnance Survey teams preparing the summit as a trigonometrical station at 277 feet above sea level, is not entirely clear. The whole structure sits within a large circular enclosure roughly 33 metres in diameter, itself a post-1700 field boundary, which is plainly visible in aerial photography from 1969. Running just 20 metres to the west is a medieval roadway recorded as Bohereenamarve, and Templecross church and its graveyard lie around 600 metres to the north-east, suggesting this small hillock has sat at the edge of an active landscape for a very long time.

The mound is set in open grassland with wide views across the surrounding countryside, which explains both its prehistoric appeal as a monument site and its later attraction to the Ordnance Survey. The spiral terrace is still legible on the ground, giving the mound an unexpectedly deliberate, almost ceremonial appearance that stops well short of anything that could have been planned as a single coherent design.