A bowl-barrow is, in simple terms, a rounded earthen mound raised over a burial, typically dating to the Bronze Age, and usually accompanied by a surrounding ditch or fosse. This particular example in the townland of Clondalever is roughly twelve metres across and rises to about 1.7 metres at its highest point on the western side. What makes it worth pausing over is how visibly the mound has been altered, resisted, and partly undone by time. Its original circular form has become oddly angular: tree roots along the southern edge have actually held sections of the mound together, while animal activity and slippage on the western side have flattened it into something close to a straight line. Large chunks are missing from the northern and southern faces.

When David McGuinness surveyed the mound in 2015, he noted the remnants of a dry-walled revetment on the south-western side, a short stretch of drystone walling no more than a metre long and half a metre high, partly running beneath the base of a mature ash tree. Dry-walled revetments of this kind are occasionally used to reinforce or reshape earthen monuments, and the thinking here is that this walling may have been added within the last few hundred years simply to stop a large tree from toppling off the mound's edge. Whether the walling once extended further around the perimeter is unclear, though loose stones on the north-western side suggest it might have. Earlier fieldwork, carried out in 1970 and 1976, recorded a shallow fosse running around the earthwork along with a low irregular bank beyond it, but by 2015 only a faint arc of ditch was traceable along the north-eastern side, and some fieldworkers had already questioned whether the ditch and bank were original prehistoric features at all. Local tradition adds one further detail. According to a note made in 1970, a cross-bar was at some point pushed into the mound and disappeared entirely from view; locals took this as evidence of a cave inside. What it more likely indicates, according to McGuinness, is a cist, a small stone-lined burial chamber of the kind often found at the core of Bronze Age barrows. The mound sits within a wider funerary landscape: three other barrows in the same townland would be visible from the hilltop were it not for intervening trees, including one about 750 metres to the west and two others roughly 1.2 kilometres to the north, beyond the valley of the Drumhurlin River.