What makes it quietly odd is the arrangement of its edges: to the east, a roughly-built wall about 1.1 metres high contains the spread, while an upright stone standing 0.75 metres tall rises just inside that wall, and a smaller upright marks the western limit. The whole thing has the quality of something half-remembered, a structure whose logic has become difficult to read.

The mound sits approximately 30 metres east of a cashel, a type of stone-walled ringfort characteristic of early medieval Ireland, which suggests this part of the hillside was once a place of some organised activity. Whether the mound is related to that enclosure, predates it, or is something else entirely, the available record does not firmly say. The description was first set down by O'Shea and Crowley in 1972 and later incorporated into the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, published in 1992. The site looks out over Bear Haven and Bear Island, the sheltered inlet and the island that guards it on the southern edge of the Beara Peninsula, a stretch of coastline that was strategically significant well into the twentieth century.