What makes this particular spot quietly remarkable is not the mound itself but what lay beneath it: a roughly circular scorched area about four metres across, its old ground surface blackened by fire, scattered with fragments of cremated bone. The cremation had not been carried out elsewhere and then deposited here; the burning happened on this very spot, and the mound, known to archaeologists as a bowl-barrow, was raised directly over the place where the fire had died.

The site sits within a dense archaeological complex on land identified by the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing between 1917 and 1919, as the supposed location of Temaír Erann, the ancient burial ground of the Ernai tribe on Slievereagh. Bowl-barrows are a type of prehistoric funerary monument, essentially a rounded earthen mound covering a burial, and this one, recorded as Tumulus II, was excavated by Seán P. Ó Ríordáin between 1934 and 1935. Ó Ríordáin found that near the centre of the fire-blackened area there was a small elliptical pit, roughly 28 by 24 centimetres across and about 10 centimetres deep, filled with cremated bones mixed with charcoal. Close to the top of this deposit, covered by a thin layer of charcoal, was a small ornamented bone plaque. The plaque had been in the fire; its surface was cracked by the heat. The barrow was not standing alone: a ringfort lies approximately 30 metres to the north-east, a cist burial, a stone-lined grave of the type common in prehistoric Ireland, lies 38 metres to the south-west, and two further bowl-barrows are recorded nearby within a broader ancient field system.

The site lies in rough pasture, which means the ground can be uneven and access is not always straightforward. Visitors with an interest in the excavation record would find Ó Ríordáin's original 1940 report the most useful companion; it includes a plan of the site and precise measurements that give a sense of just how carefully and closely this small pit and its contents were documented. The landscape itself, with its layered monuments spread across Slievereagh, rewards a slow read of the terrain rather than a quick visit to any single point.