The result is a bowl-barrow, a type of rounded funerary mound associated with Bronze Age burial practice, and this particular example in Graigue makes unusually clever use of its natural setting. Rather than being constructed entirely by human effort on flat ground, the mound is built onto the end of an esker, a long sinuous ridge of gravel and sand deposited by meltwater streams beneath a glacier during the last Ice Age. The builders were not simply piling up earth; they were extending and shaping something the landscape had already begun.

The mound itself is roughly circular, measuring about 26.5 metres north to south and 25.3 metres east to west, which makes it a substantial presence on the ridge. On the western side, where the natural topography offers no dramatic fall, the builders added a fosse, a cut ditch roughly four metres wide, and a stony outer bank beyond it. That bank stands nearly four metres high on its outer face, giving the monument a pronounced, deliberate profile when viewed from the west. On the eastern side, no such earthworks were needed; the esker simply drops away steeply, leaving the mound sitting approximately eleven metres above the ground below. The combination of constructed and natural defence, if defence is even the right word for a burial monument, gives the site an unusual dual character. The people who built it understood the ridge, read its geometry, and placed the monument exactly where natural height and artificial enclosure would work together.