It is easy to walk past without registering what it is. Measuring roughly nineteen metres north to south, eighteen metres east to west, and rising only half a metre above the surrounding ground, it has the look of a slight natural rise, the kind of undulation that farmers learn to mow around without giving it much thought. But the shallow central depression gives it away. This is a barrow, a prehistoric burial mound, and that dip at its centre is the telltale sign of a structure that has been here long enough for its interior to have gradually settled inward.

Barrows of this kind are among the oldest monuments in the Irish landscape, raised during the Bronze Age as funerary monuments for the dead, though the traditions and forms varied considerably across centuries and regions. This example is classed as a bowl barrow, circular in plan and defined by an earthen mound rather than stone. The near-circular shape, with only a metre of difference between its two axes, suggests the original builders worked with some care, even if time and agriculture have since reduced it to its present battered state. The 1999 Archaeological Inventory of County Galway, compiled by Olive Alcock, Kathy de hÓra, and Paul Gosling, records it simply as poorly preserved, which is a polite way of acknowledging that centuries of weather, grazing, and perhaps the odd plough have taken their toll. What remains is a shadow of the original monument, but a legible one.