Gravel quarrying removed the ridge to its east, leaving the barrow, a bowl-barrow being a roughly circular earthen mound typically surrounded by a ditch or fosse, stranded at the top of a fifteen-metre drop. Before excavation, it looked as though the mound had simply been shaped from the natural high point of the ridge. What lay beneath told a different story.

When archaeologist M.A. Timoney excavated the site in 1977, the internal structure turned out to be largely artificial. The mound, eleven metres in diameter and 1.4 metres high, had been built up in careful layers: two separate mantles of large stones separated by earth, with a retaining wall of four to six courses still standing in places around the edge where it had not collapsed into the surrounding fosse. At the centre, between the two stone layers, were two partly disarticulated burials laid on a north-east to south-west axis. The bones were incomplete, with no vertebrae, ribs, hands, or feet recovered, and the arrangement of what remained was striking: a male skull, belonging to a person aged between twenty and thirty, was found beneath the pelvis of the lower skeleton, while a second skull, that of a woman aged between thirty and forty, lay about thirty centimetres from the nearest bone. There were no grave goods of any kind, leaving the monument without a firm date. A further detail connects the site to a wider local cluster of prehistoric monuments. The scholar R.A.S. Macalister noted in the early 1920s that a boulder carved with concentric circles had been recorded on a mound in this area. It is possible that this carved stone, later incorporated into the wall of a nearby school building and subsequently moved to Sligo County Museum, originated here.