These are bowl-barrows, a type of Bronze Age burial monument consisting of a rounded mound enclosed by a shallow encircling ditch, and there are at least six of them here, possibly seven, arranged across the hilltop in a grouping that has accumulated its own layers of name and myth. The hill itself is called Cnoc na Caillíghe, the Hill of the Hag, a name shared with the great passage-tomb cemetery at Loughcrew and with other hilltop burial sites across Ireland linked in folklore to the Cailleach Bheara, an ancient supernatural figure associated with landscape and the dead.

When John O'Donovan mapped the area for the Ordnance Survey Letters in 1837, he noted three barrows on this hill, labelling them 'na móitínídhe', and recorded the name Cnoc na Caillíghe. The full extent of the cemetery became clearer only later; a survey carried out in 2015 by David McGuinness identified the site as a barrow-cemetery of up to seven monuments, though one mound had apparently been removed at some point, possibly through quarrying activity, and its original character remained uncertain. The hilltop commands a position of considerable significance in its local landscape. Lough Lene lies just 0.5 kilometres to the south, and although it cannot be seen from here, the early medieval monastery of Fore sits only 1.2 kilometres to the north-east, on lower ground at the foot of the same group of hills. Across the western end of Lough Lene, roughly 2.2 kilometres to the south-south-west, another striking monument survives on a hilltop in Ballany: Ráth an Dúin, also known as Dún Doirbhgheis or Turgesius's Fort. O'Donovan described it in 1837 as an oval earthen enclosure adapted to the shape of the hill, approximately 160 feet by 210 feet. Though tradition connects it to the Viking leader Turgesius, O'Donovan himself was sceptical of that association, arguing on the basis of comparison with Dún na Sgiath on Lough Ennell that the site was a seat of Irish kings well before the Norse period.

What gives the Lakill and Moortown barrow-cemetery its particular quality is not any single monument but the density of association in this small stretch of Westmeath landscape: prehistoric burial mounds, a hill name echoing one of the most significant megalithic sites in Ireland, an early Christian monastery just out of sight, and a contested royal fort across the water, all within a radius that a person standing on Cnoc na Caillíghe could take in, at least in part, on a clear day.