Roughly fifteen metres across and standing about two metres high, it never appeared on any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, which means it slipped entirely through the cartographic record that archaeologists and planners typically rely on. Local tradition holds that the mound may have served as a Famine burial ground or a children's burial ground, the latter being a type of unconsecrated site, sometimes called a cillín, where infants who died unbaptised were interred apart from the main churchyard. That layered ambiguity, prehistoric earthwork, Famine grave, or cillín, gives the site an unresolved quality that no amount of surveying has yet settled.

The mound first came to official attention in 1981, when construction work at the airport disturbed or exposed it. The discovery was noted but its precise location was not recorded at the time, leaving archaeologists with little more than a general area to work with. When the Sites and Monuments Record was compiled in 1991, it could only be entered as an unlocated mound, and by 1997 it had been dropped from the Record of Monuments and Places altogether, a register that carries statutory protection. It took a dedicated archaeological assessment in 2009, carried out with the involvement of M. Byrne, to physically relocate the mound and restore it to the record. The gap between its first discovery and its rediscovery spans nearly thirty years, during which one of Mayo's quieter archaeological features existed in a bureaucratic limbo, known to have existed somewhere but impossible to act on.