What makes it quietly odd is not its size but its shape and its silence: a penannular, or almost-complete-ring, form defined by an inner ditch and an outer bank, open at the south-east and offering no trace of a formal entrance. Something was enclosed here, or perhaps kept out, but the monument gives away very little about its purpose or its people.

When surveyors described the site in 1975, they recorded a roughly oval area measuring approximately 18 metres north-east to south-west and 17 metres north-west to south-east. The inner fosse, a ditch, is wide, shallow, and U-shaped, visible along the south-western, western, northern, and north-eastern arcs. Beyond it, a low, broad, grass-covered earthen bank follows the same curve. The surrounding pasture was, until drainage work carried out in the 1970s, prone to flooding, which may partly explain why neither the Ordnance Survey's 1837 six-inch map nor the revised 25-inch edition of 1913 records any monument here at all. Whether the wetness of the ground obscured it from earlier mapmakers, or simply made it unremarkable in a landscape of drainage banks and depressions, is difficult to say. A ringfort lies roughly ten metres to the north-west, suggesting this corner of Parcellstown held some significance in the early medieval period, though the barrow's relationship to that enclosure, and its precise date, remain unresolved.

The earthwork is most legible from aerial photography, where its penannular outline is clear despite being undefined on the south-eastern side. On the ground, among the drainage depressions and low banks scattered across the vicinity, it would be easy to read the whole thing as a quirk of agricultural land management rather than an ancient monument quietly holding its shape in the Westmeath grass.