Neither the 1842 survey nor the revised 1905 edition of the six-inch maps carries any trace of it, which is quietly remarkable given its scale: the mound stretches roughly 22 metres east to west and 11.5 metres north to south, and rises to a height of about 2.6 metres, built from large stones. A cairn of this kind is essentially a deliberate heap of stones raised over a burial or as a monument to mark a significant place, and they are among the oldest surviving human constructions in the Irish landscape. This one is substantial enough that its absence from the historical maps is more puzzling than its presence on a windswept ridge.

That the surveyors missed it on two separate occasions, across more than sixty years, is likely explained by the nature of the ground rather than any carelessness. Forestry plantations, which now cover the immediate area, obscure a great deal, and ridge-top monuments in wooded or heavily vegetated terrain are easily overlooked from the lower ground where surveyors typically worked. The cairn itself was documented in the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, a systematic county-wide survey, which placed it formally on record for the first time. Its age and original purpose remain unspecified in what is known about it, though oval cairns of this construction in the Irish midlands and south generally belong to prehistory, sometimes associated with burial and sometimes with territorial or ceremonial marking of high ground.