On a south-east-facing slope in Bishopswood, County Tipperary, a prehistoric burial mound sits on elevated ground surrounded by wet, poorly drained land, positioned so that wide views open out to the south and east across the surrounding countryside. The choice of location was deliberate and meaningful, as it so often was with these monuments. Mound barrows are among the most ancient funerary forms in Ireland, earthen or stone-covered mounds raised over burials, sometimes simple in construction and sometimes enclosing elaborate chambers. This one is relatively modest in scale, roughly 30 metres across on its north-south axis and 17 metres east to west, rising to a height of about 0.7 metres.

The mound has not fared well over the centuries. At some point, the southern half was quarried away, a loss that was already recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which means the damage predates the mid-nineteenth century at the latest. What remains of the platform has since been absorbed into a large coniferous plantation, and forestry drainage channels cut across the western side of the mound. The conifers now occupy the interior, and there is no surviving evidence of an enclosing fosse or bank, the ditch-and-earthwork boundary that sometimes defines monuments of this type. The combination of quarrying, drainage works, and commercial forestry has left a structure that is, archaeologically speaking, poorly preserved, a raised circular scarp in the trees where something considerably more complete once stood.