It is easy to miss, its profile softened by centuries of grass and weather, but beneath that unremarkable surface lies evidence of a deliberate, organised act of cremation carried out long before any written record of the place existed. What makes the site particularly arresting is not the mound in isolation but its position within a wider complex, ringed by companion monuments on nearly every side, each one suggesting that this hillside was understood, for a very long time, as a place set apart for the dead.

The mound belongs to a type known as a bowl-barrow, a Bronze Age burial form consisting of a rounded earthen mound surrounded by a shallow ditch, or fosse, which distinguishes it from the earth around it. The archaeologist Seán P. Ó Ríordáin excavated this barrow, recorded as Tumulus II, between 1934 and 1935, and his findings were published in 1940. He identified three bowl-barrows in the immediate area, each with a mound of roughly 13.7 metres in average diameter and standing to about 1.8 metres in height. Beneath this particular mound, on the original ground surface, excavators uncovered a roughly circular patch of charcoal about four metres across, scattered with fragments of cremated bone. Ó Ríordáin concluded that a cremation fire had been lit directly on that spot, and that the mound had been raised over the remains afterwards. The site sits within what scholars, drawing on the work of antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp in the years around 1917 to 1919, have identified as Temaír Erann, the supposed ancient cemetery of the Ernai tribe on Slievereagh. A ringfort lies roughly 30 metres to the northeast, and a cist, a small stone-lined burial box, lies about 38 metres to the southwest, making this one node in a complex that spans several different periods of prehistoric and early historic use.

The mound remains visible in the pasture at Cush, and aerial imagery confirms that the circular form and its defining fosse are still legible on the ground. The surrounding field system, also recorded as part of the wider complex, gives the whole landscape an unusually complete quality. Visitors approaching on foot should look for the subtle rise of the mound against the hillside, and note the slight depression of the fosse around its base. The site sits in working farmland, so access requires care and appropriate permissions. The monuments here are unenclosed and unlit, with no interpretive signage on site, meaning a little preparation with the National Monuments Service records beforehand will considerably sharpen what you find when you arrive.