Instead, as local writer James Tuite noted with evident distaste, it was pressed into service as a stepping stone across a boundary ditch. That detail alone says something about how casually extraordinary things can be treated when they turn up in a field. The mound itself is a bowl-barrow, a circular burial mound typically ringed by a ditch, and at roughly 34.5 metres in diameter with a nearly conical profile rising between three and four metres above the surrounding ditch, it is a substantial presence in what is otherwise flat, low-lying pasture near the western shore of Lough Owel.

Writing in 1912, Tuite placed the mound within a remarkable cluster of monuments. Nearby, he noted, was the mound of Forraidh, said by medieval Irish texts to be the burial place of Fiachra, brother of Niall of the Nine Hostages. The mounds at Slanemore were associated with the Táin Bó Cuailgne, the great cattle-raid epic, and the hill of Fremhain lay within the same neighbourhood. Tuite also recorded that the Slighe Assail, one of the ancient royal roads radiating from Tara, passed through the surrounding townlands, its course still traceable at that time. A 2012 survey by David McGuinness added a further layer of complexity. The ditch surrounding the mound is far too shallow and narrow to have supplied the earth needed to build it, which raises the possibility that the mound is partly a modified kame, a natural glacial hillock shaped by ice-age processes and subsequently adapted by human hands. The graveslab found at its centre, lying at ground level with no evidence of human remains beneath it, only deepens the puzzle: the mound may be medieval rather than prehistoric, or it may be a prehistoric monument that was reused in the medieval period.

Just twenty metres to the west-north-west of the barrow, McGuinness identified a broad sunken channel, twelve metres wide and half a metre deep, running away to the west-north-west. Local landowner Dermot Bannon identified this as the Slighe Assail itself, the same ancient road Tuite had described a century earlier. The ruined medieval church of Portloman, set within a curvilinear enclosure on the lakeshore, lies roughly 190 metres to the north-east, and that church may itself sit on a stepped mound or tumulus. Two mature deciduous trees grow on the eastern and southern edges of the barrow, probably planted in the eighteenth century, and the mound has suffered some erosion from grazing sheep in more recent times.