A closer look in the field changed that entirely. When archaeologist David McGuinness surveyed it in 2012, he found something older and stranger: a prehistoric burial mound, or barrow, that had been misread from the outset.

The monument is substantial, a sub-circular earthwork with a central platform measuring roughly 39.5 by 43 metres across, enclosed by a ditch and the remnants of an outer bank. The platform has a slightly dished appearance, which initially suggested the hollowed interior of a ringfort, but McGuinness found no convincing bank around the platform edge to support that reading. A modern field fence, lined with mature deciduous trees, cuts across the eastern end of the site, dividing it between two fields, and it is only in the smaller eastern segment that traces of the low external bank survive, running to about 4 metres in width. McGuinness estimated that if the bank originally continued around the full circuit, as there is no particular reason to doubt, the overall diameter of the monument would have been around 58 metres. The ditch itself, best preserved on the south-western side, is flat-based and between 2 and 2.5 metres wide at its base, with the central mound rising up to 0.64 metres above the ditch floor.

What makes the site particularly compelling is its context. The barrow sits only 8 metres to the north-east of a bowl-barrow, a rounded burial mound dug into or built up from the ground, and roughly 100 metres from another possible prehistoric burial mound. Further upslope, on the hilltop about 150 metres to the north-east, three additional barrows survive. Taken together, all six monuments form a roughly linear arrangement running from north-east to south-west across the hillside, a quiet prehistoric landscape largely unmarked and unremarked upon, sitting in ordinary pastureland in the Irish midlands.