A trench roughly 2.4 metres wide had been cut through the centre of the earthwork in 1924, the soil carefully replaced, and the diggers had left empty-handed. It was an oddly conscientious act of failure. Beneath all that disturbance, however, the original burial had survived essentially intact, and what it contained was quietly remarkable: a spread of cremated bone and charcoal across an irregular patch of old ground surface, the remnants of a pyre that had burned in that precise spot before the mound was heaped over it.

The site sits within a dense archaeological landscape known as the Supposed Site of Temaír Erann, identified by antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp in the early twentieth century as the ancient tribal cemetery of the Ernai people on Slievereagh. A bowl-barrow is a type of prehistoric funerary mound characterised by a rounded profile and, often, an encircling ditch or fosse; this example, catalogued as Tumulus III, is one of three such barrows clustered within a large field system at Cush. It was excavated between 1934 and 1935 by Seán P. Ó Ríordáin, who recorded its overall diameter as approximately 16.45 metres and its height above the original ground surface as around 1.8 metres. Ó Ríordáin noted that the mound had been heavily covered in furze, unlike its neighbours, and that a second, unexplained disturbance was also visible in section, possibly from an unrecorded episode of digging in 1924. A ringfort lies roughly 50 metres to the north-east, and a cist, a small stone-lined burial box, sits just 10 metres to the south-west.

The mound sits in rough pasture and remains visible today as a raised circular platform, with traces of an external fosse detectable on aerial imagery. The surrounding complex is extensive, and it is worth approaching the site with some awareness of the broader field system rather than focusing on the barrow in isolation. The terrain is uneven and the vegetation can be dense depending on the season; late winter or early spring, before growth thickens, tends to give the clearest sense of the earthwork's shape. The site is not formally managed or interpreted on the ground, so any visit benefits from consulting the National Monuments Service records beforehand to orient yourself within what is, even by Irish standards, an unusually layered prehistoric landscape.