On the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, it was marked as Sheenafinnoge Fort, an anglicisation of Sídh na Fionnóige, meaning hill of the raven. A later recorder, Cantwell, writing in 1955, knew it as Sheenavanogue, Sidhe na BhFeannog, the fairy mound of the scald crows. Different birds, different century, the same piece of ground.

The antiquarian Thomas Westropp, writing in 1919 and 1920, described the mound as a holy mound and gave it yet another name, Síd Asail, linking it to the assembly place of the Óenach Cairbre, a gathering site marked by a pair of conjoined ringforts lying about 1.1 kilometres to the south-east on the floodplain of the Camoge River. An óenach was a periodic assembly in early Irish society, a place for legal, commercial, and ritual activity, and its association with a sacred mound of this kind is well attested elsewhere in the country. Sometime in the 1800s, the mound was partially dug open and two iron objects were recovered: described variously by different sources as a sword and mace, or a sword and axe. These were sent to the National Museum of Ireland. Cantwell recorded the local belief that the finds marked the burial place of soldiers killed in a 1579 battle between the forces of Sir Nicholas Malby and the Earl of Desmond, though he noted that the mound's association with the síde, the supernatural beings of Irish tradition, was almost certainly older and more fundamental than any such later use.

When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland recorded the monument in 2007, they measured a raised circular mound roughly 4.7 metres north to south and 4 metres east to west, surrounded by the remains of a fosse (a shallow defensive or boundary ditch) and an outer earthen bank, with a causewayed entrance on the south-south-west side. A bowl-barrow is a type of prehistoric funerary monument, typically a rounded mound enclosed by a ditch and outer bank, and this example fits that form reasonably well, though its full prehistory remains unexcavated. The hollow visible at the summit is almost certainly the scar left by the nineteenth-century digging. The mound sits on a north-north-west-facing slope in Garrane townland, Pubblebrien barony, with the enclosure recorded as LI031-005 lying about 125 metres to the east. On aerial imagery it appears as an oval, tree-planted earthwork, the ring of trees perhaps the clearest thing to look for when approaching across the surrounding pasture.