A barrow, in the broadest sense, is a burial or ceremonial mound built in prehistory, often surrounded by a ditch known as a fosse. This particular example takes the form of a raised circular platform roughly thirty metres across, enclosed by just such a fosse, and its survival in any recognisable form at all is, given its recent history, something of a minor surprise.

The site appears on the 1843 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it is recorded as a double-banked enclosure with a central mound, suggesting that at least two concentric earthwork elements were visible to nineteenth-century surveyors. By 1925, a researcher identified in the notes as McDix described a circular area of approximately thirty-two metres in diameter, enclosed by a bank and an external fosse, which broadly matches the earlier cartographic record. The site was studied again by Price in 1940 and by Healy in 1975, each account adding a layer to what is known about the monument's condition over time. In 1960, the land was ploughed and planted with commercial forestry, a practice that caused significant damage to countless earthworks across Ireland during the mid-twentieth century. The trees were clear-felled in 1994, exposing the site once more but leaving it, as the record bluntly notes, badly damaged.

The barrow sits within Ballinascorney Upper, a townland in the Dublin Mountains southwest of Tallaght, and reaching it involves navigating forest tracks rather than any marked heritage trail. The clearing created by the 1994 felling gives the site some visibility, though the damage from decades of forestry activity means the earthworks are much reduced from what the Ordnance Survey cartographers once mapped. Visitors with an interest in prehistoric landscapes will want to arrive with a detailed map or GPS coordinates, as signage in this area is minimal. The fosse and platform remain discernible to a careful eye, and the location at the edge of Tallaght Hill gives a sense of the broader upland context in which prehistoric communities placed such monuments.