It is not especially large, measuring roughly 12.6 metres north to south and 12.3 metres east to west, and rising less than two metres above the ground on its northern side, but its placement is deliberate and, once you understand the landscape around it, quietly arresting. The hillock itself is stepped at its lower levels, with the ground falling away most sharply to the east, and the local landowner has noted that when the low-lying area to the north was flooded, this rise would have emerged dramatically from the water, a raised platform visible from a considerable distance.

The mound is a barrow, a burial monument of prehistoric origin, dome-shaped and with a flattish summit, though its precise classification has been a matter of some debate. A bowl barrow is typically defined by a surrounding ditch, but when surveyor David McGuinness examined the site in 2015, he found only vague and uncertain traces of one on the northern side, making the classification difficult to confirm. What lies beneath the turf is also unclear; the mound appears to be stony, but whether it is a true cairn, built from gathered stone, or simply a mound of stony earth has not been established. A tree grows on its northern side, a thorn tree on its southern, and an older blackthorn hedge once ran along its south-western foot, the remnant of a square enclosure fence that appeared on nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey maps. The Cooksborough mound is one of five barrows distributed across three townlands on either side of the stream. Two other mound barrows, both now destroyed, once stood on hillocks about 200 metres to the north-east, also overlooking the water. Two ring-barrows, a type of circular burial monument typically defined by a bank and ditch rather than a solid mound, survive closer to the stream in what was once the flooded ground at the base of the hillocks. Together they suggest a funerary landscape deliberately arranged around this stretch of water and the elevated ground above it.