It measures roughly twelve metres east to west and five metres north to south, rising only half a metre above the surrounding ground. Locally it is known as a children's burial ground, a designation that immediately places it within a particular and quietly sorrowful tradition in Irish rural life.

Sites like this are known in Irish as cillíní, informal burial places used historically for unbaptised infants, who under Catholic ecclesiastical rules were excluded from consecrated ground. They were often sited at the margins of parishes, in townlands far from the parish church, on old earthworks, or at the edges of fields. The Maulmareen mound carries the additional archaeological interest of a cist-like structure at its south-east corner, formed by three stones set into the ground and measuring just over a metre east to west and about seventy centimetres north to south. A cist is a small stone-lined box grave, a form with deep prehistoric roots in Ireland, and the presence here of what may be a displaced covering stone on the north side suggests the structure was once more complete. Whether this cist predates the mound's use as a children's burial ground, or whether it represents a later interment that borrowed the stones of some earlier feature, is not recorded. The mound itself may be of considerable antiquity, repurposed over time as the landscape and its communities changed around it.