The mound, roughly three metres high, is now much reduced and broken up by field fences, and what lies beneath it has been a matter of speculation since at least the eighteenth century. The site is known historically as Cam Dalian, and what little was recorded about its interior came not from any formal excavation but from an account of what sounds like an opportunistic, and fairly destructive, opening.

Around 1739, a writer named Richardson set down details of what had apparently been found inside the cairn some twenty-five years earlier. He described a passage leading to three internal chambers, which he called apartments, and reported that the diggers recovered several urns, five large skulls, and a considerable quantity of burnt bones. A passage tomb is a type of megalithic burial monument, typically Neolithic in date, in which a stone-lined corridor leads to one or more burial chambers set within a large cairn or mound. The finds Richardson described fit that pattern well enough to suggest that Cam Dalian may indeed have been such a structure, though the damage done during that early opening, and subsequently by the encroaching fences, has made any firm assessment difficult. Richardson also noted features surrounding the cairn that no longer seem to exist: a square stone enclosure roughly twenty yards across to the south, and four small circular plots further out on the hill, each enclosed by large stones and identified in his account as old burial places. None of these has been located by later investigators, leaving open the question of whether they were removed, collapsed beyond recognition, or simply missed.