For much of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the monument was swallowed by forestry plantation, invisible beneath a canopy of commercial trees. Once those trees were removed after 2004, the mound re-emerged more or less as it had always been, its form largely intact and its proportions consistent with what had been recorded generations earlier.

The mound belongs to the tradition of prehistoric burial barrows, earthen or stone-built raised mounds constructed over the dead, often during the Bronze Age. At its centre lies what may be a cist, a stone-lined burial box roughly 2.4 metres in length, though this has not been excavated or confirmed. Around the base of the mound, faint traces of a shallow fosse, an encircling ditch, can still be made out. These ditches are a common feature of such monuments; the material dug from them was typically used to build up the mound itself. The site was noted by Liam Price in 1934, and the fact that the mound still corresponds to his description is quietly remarkable, given how much Irish upland terrain has been altered by afforestation and subsequent clearance in the intervening decades.