A bowl-barrow is a rounded earthen mound, typically raised over a burial from the Bronze Age, often encircled by a ditch. This one is nearly circular, measuring just under fifteen metres across, with a flattened top roughly seven metres wide that appears level when viewed from a distance, even though the ground beneath it slopes away to the north-west. The builders compensated for that slope by piling more material on the lower side, which means the mound's northern flank descends over six and a half metres from summit to ground level, while the southern flank covers only four metres. The effect is of a carefully engineered flatness imposed on uncooperative terrain.

The ridge on which the barrow sits is itself a geological curiosity. It appears to be a kame, a type of irregular mound or ridge deposited by meltwater at the edge of a retreating glacier. The wider landscape is saturated with the remnants of glaciation. Within two hundred metres, three kettle-hole lakes are visible, formed where buried fragments of dead ice eventually melted and the ground above collapsed inward. Just four metres north of the barrow, a hollow in the ridge was long assumed by at least one observer to be a quarry or sand-pit, but closer inspection, combined with the evidence of the First Edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, suggests it is another such dead-ice hollow, its low encircling bank a natural feature rather than a human one. A second comparable hollow lies some sixty metres to the east. These features recur across glaciated Westmeath, and their proximity to burial monuments is not uncommon. Prominent to the east, roughly two hundred metres away, is a fortified hillock on a glacial ridge, catalogued as a ringfort but with earthen ramparts around its base and traces of a stone wall at its summit that give it a rather different character. From the barrow itself, two further, much-denuded mound-barrows are visible about one and a half kilometres to the north-east, across the valley of the Drumhurlin River, and a fourth barrow lies approximately seven hundred and fifty metres to the east, currently obscured by trees.