The whole arrangement is formal and deliberate, yet its purpose is not immediately obvious, and local tradition long insisted that the mound was not a memorial at all but the burial place of a gentleman's horse.

The structure was commissioned by Charles James Knox (1835–1924) as a memorial to his father, Sir Francis Arthur Knox-Gore, Baronet and Lord Lieutenant of Sligo, who lived from 1803 to 1873. Knox-Gore was the man who built Belleek Abbey, the manor house that stands roughly 150 metres to the north-west and later became known as Belleek Castle. The memorial itself is an elaborate cut-limestone piece in the gothic style, raised on a circular, flat-topped earthen mound approximately 23 metres in diameter and nearly four metres high. Around the base of the mound runs a fosse, a wide defensive-style ditch, with an external bank beyond it. Steps cut into the south-south-eastern slope lead up to the top. The sheer scale of the mound, which is considerably larger than the gothic centrepiece it supports, is almost certainly what fed the local legend. A mound that size, the reasoning seems to have gone, must contain something, and if not a person, then perhaps a beloved animal.

The site sits within what was formerly the Belleek Castle estate, now woodland, and a forest pathway to the east-south-east of the monument has been routed along the line of the outer bank, which gives some sense of how the landscape has absorbed the structure over time. The steps cut into the mound remain, and the gothic limestone monument at the top, though not large in itself, has an unexpected gravity when encountered among the trees.