To look at it, the cairn seems unremarkable enough: a roughly circular, flat-topped heap of grassed-over stones, about nine metres across at the base and only a metre and a quarter high. The landowner has described it as a modern construction, and on that basis it might be dismissed without a second glance. But beneath the surface lie four stone slabs, and those slabs complicate the story considerably.

Writing in 1952, a researcher named McCaffrey recorded what he found when examining a depression at the cairn's centre, a hollow roughly three metres long, 1.8 metres wide, and 0.8 metres deep. Within it sat a single upright stone, around 1.2 metres long and 0.7 metres tall, set on edge. McCaffrey interpreted this as the remains of a plundered cist or chamber. A cist is a small stone-lined box grave, typically prehistoric, in which a body or cremated remains would have been placed before being sealed and covered with a cairn. The presence of standing stonework and covering slabs suggests that whatever was built here originally, it was not simply a field clearance heap. Whether the visible cairn was raised over an already ancient structure, or represents a later attempt to consolidate or conceal something already disturbed, the notes leave open. What seems reasonably clear is that the mound carries older material within it, and that the plundering had already taken place before McCaffrey arrived to document what remained.