But the shape of this bowl-barrow, slightly elongated east to west at around 16.5 metres across and standing roughly two metres high, is precisely what its prehistoric builders intended to be seen. They placed it where the land drops away sharply on all sides, giving the mound a commanding presence across a wide sweep of upland landscape.

Bowl-barrows are among the most common funerary monuments of the Bronze Age, typically consisting of a circular earthen mound covering a burial, sometimes surrounded by a fosse, or encircling ditch, which provided the material for piling up the mound itself. At Killeen, faint traces of that enclosing fosse survive on the eastern and western sides, though they are no longer continuous. The choice of such a high, exposed position was deliberate and is repeated at Bronze Age burial sites across Ireland: elevation carried ritual significance, and visibility, both of and from the monument, appears to have mattered to the communities who built them. Exactly who was buried here, or when within the long arc of the Bronze Age, is not recorded, but the site is protected under a preservation order, which at least ensures the mound itself is not disturbed further.