The animals congregate on its summit, their hooves stripping the sod and breaking chunks from the mound's edge, and in doing so they have inadvertently revealed something unexpected about what lies beneath. Where the turf has gone, a mass of stones mixed with earth is visible, suggesting that this monument is closer in character to a cairn, a stone-built burial mound, than to a conventional earthen barrow. The distinction matters: earthen barrows and stone cairns belong to overlapping but distinct traditions of prehistoric funerary monument building, and the surface appearance of a grassy mound can easily obscure which type you are actually looking at.

When David McGuinness surveyed the site in 2013, the mound measured roughly 17 metres north to south and 15 metres east to west, rising to about 2.2 metres on its north-eastern side. It sits on a broad, low hilltop at the south-eastern end of the Hill of Laragh, a ridge running north-west to south-east that reaches 123 metres above sea level about a kilometre to the north-west. The elevated, open position is typical of prehistoric burial monuments, which were frequently placed to be visible across a landscape rather than tucked away. A narrow shelf running around the northern half of the mound, just above its base, might look at first like a deliberately constructed ledge or berm, but McGuinness concluded it was simply the result of cattle repeatedly walking the same circuit around the mound. About twelve metres to the east, a low grassy ridge running north-east to south-west creates a faint break in slope, with higher ground to the north-west; this is tentatively identified as the remains of a removed field boundary rather than any feature of the original monument.