The word maoilín, from which the first part of the name derives, means something like 'bald' or 'bare' in Irish, and it was apparently applied here because the mound sits conspicuously on a small ridge, visible above the surrounding reclaimed pasture in a way that made it look, to local eyes, like the crown of a shorn head.

The monument itself consists of a roughly teardrop-shaped platform, about 22 metres along its long axis running northeast to southwest, with a broadly circular mound rising from near the wider northeastern end. Surveyed in detail by David McGuinness in 2013, the mound measures approximately 8 metres across and stands up to a metre above the platform, which itself rises about a metre above the surrounding ground. A field inspection in 1977 described it as probably a small bell barrow, a type of Bronze Age burial mound characterised by a central earthen boss set within a flat berm or shelf, and that interpretation still seems to hold. Ploughing in the immediate vicinity has sharpened the platform's edges somewhat, and a post-1700 field fence, since removed, damaged the southern and western curve of the berm, leaving one side with an uncharacteristically straight profile.

What complicates the picture, pleasingly, is the local mythological claim attached to the site. Writing in 1916 to 1917, a scholar named Kane recorded that the monument was also known as Cnoc na Maoil or Croc na Maoil, and he proposed that it was one of the three bald hills of Meath whose tops were struck off by the sword of Fergus mac Róich during the great cattle-raid epic, the Táin Bó Cúailnge. A later writer, Shaw, published a rebuttal in 1921, preferring the more prosaic identification of a sepulchral tumulus, a burial mound, and leaving the mythological connection without much scholarly support. The barrow itself, quietly prominent on its low ridge, offers no opinion on the matter.