What makes it particularly unusual is its construction in two distinct tiers, a level of architectural ambition that sets it apart from the simpler earthen humps that more commonly survive across the Irish landscape. A bowl-barrow is a type of prehistoric funerary monument, essentially a circular mound of earth raised over a burial, sometimes surrounded by a ditch and outer bank. Here, that basic formula has been elaborated considerably.

The mound's upper tier is a flat-topped circular platform about four metres across at the top and sixteen metres at its base, enclosed by an earthen scarp rising some 0.7 metres on the outside. Below that sits a second tier, a level terrace roughly two and a half metres wide, itself bounded by a steep scarped edge that drops 2.2 metres, bringing the total base diameter of the whole structure to twenty metres. Beyond that, a fosse, or encircling ditch, nearly three metres wide, was cut around the mound, with an external earthen bank beyond it. The overall effect would once have been a monument of considerable visual presence, its concentric rings of bank, ditch, and tiered mound rising from the surrounding ground with deliberate formality. Time and settling have softened that impression somewhat; the mound has slumped, and on the western to north-north-western arc, the fosse and external bank have disappeared entirely, absorbed back into the earth that made them.