Sitting at 594 feet above sea level on a hilltop in County Kildare, this low earthen mound has spent centuries being mistaken for something else. By 1809, when the cartographer Longfield was mapping the area, it had already been labelled "Moat" on his survey of Oldkilcullen, placed just south of a road he called "Green Road called Drawwell Lane". Then, by 1838, the Ordnance Survey had done something even more curious with it: surveyors embedded an iron Trigonometrical Station into its surface, braced by earthfast stones, and used the ancient mound as a convenient high point for calculating the surrounding landscape. Whether the mound was deliberately chosen for its elevation or simply happened to be there is unclear, but the result is a prehistoric burial monument that spent a portion of the nineteenth century doing the work of a surveying instrument.

A bowl-barrow is a type of Bronze Age burial mound, typically a rounded earthen dome enclosed by a surrounding ditch or fosse, sometimes with an additional outer bank. The mound at Oldkilcullen is modest in scale, roughly a metre high on its western side and rising to about one and a half metres on the northern and eastern faces, with a base diameter of just over ten metres east to west. Aerial photography has revealed traces of a fosse and a possible external bank around the mound, which is what points to the bowl-barrow identification rather than the simpler "moat" label it carried for so long. The mound itself is composed of earth and stone, and the whole structure sits in open pasture with unobstructed views in every direction, which may well explain why a prehistoric community chose this particular rise to inter their dead, and why nineteenth-century surveyors found it equally useful.