The result is something that looks, from above, less like the rounded earthwork it once was and more like a dome sliced cleanly in two.

A bowl-barrow is a type of Bronze Age funerary mound, typically a low circular earthen mound enclosed by a surrounding ditch, or fosse, and built to cover a burial. The Scarteen example sits in gently undulating wet pasture at the base of a slight south-south-east-facing slope, immediately north of the Bog River. When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland recorded it in 2005, surveyors described a raised, roughly semi-circular area measuring approximately 8 metres north-north-west to east-south-east and 12 metres east-north-east to west-south-west, defined by an earthen scarp about 2.2 metres wide and 1.3 metres high externally, with an external fosse roughly 3 metres wide and 0.3 metres deep. On the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1840, the earthwork is shown sitting in the south-east corner of a field just north of the river, entirely within County Limerick, with no portion recorded in Tipperary. The current shape of the monument, with its southern edge defined by the river rather than by its own scarp, suggests the watercourse may have shifted since the barrow was first constructed, potentially carrying away whatever originally lay to the south.

The site sits in working farmland, and modern drainage infrastructure has not been kind to its edges. A double drainage ditch running along the north bank of the Bog River abuts the barrow at both its east-north-east and west-south-west sides, eroding the scarp in those places and accounting for the absence of the fosse along much of the northern arc. The interior, though it undulates slightly, is dry relative to the surrounding pasture and is overgrown with trees and scrub. For those who want a preliminary look, the outline of the earthwork is discernible on Google Earth satellite imagery, where the scrub-covered mound reads clearly against the surrounding fields. On the ground, the monument's most legible feature is the surviving scarp on its northern side; the river itself, low and quiet through this flat country, marks the point where the barrow's original extent remains a matter of reasonable conjecture.