Roughly nine metres across and rising just over a metre at its highest point above the surrounding ditch, it has the quietly eroded look of something that has been in the landscape so long it has almost become the landscape. This is a bowl-barrow, a type of prehistoric funerary monument typically consisting of a circular mound enclosed by a shallow ditch and, in some cases, a low outer bank. The form was used for burial across a long span of prehistory, and examples are found scattered across Ireland, though they are often in poor condition and easily mistaken for natural rises in the ground.

By 1979, when fieldworkers first documented this particular mound, cattle had already worn it down considerably, and the stony core was visible through the disturbed surface on its sides. A shallow fosse, the term used for the encircling ditch around such monuments, was still traceable on the east and north-east, with faint traces of an outer bank, though both had largely vanished on the southern and western sides, where old cultivation ridges had cut across instead. When David McGuinness surveyed the monument in 2012, the ditch was best preserved in the north-east quadrant, measuring up to 3.2 metres in width, and the mound itself rose 1.34 metres above it on that side. McGuinness estimated that if the ditch were intact all the way around, the overall diameter of the monument would have been in the region of fifteen metres. The site does not sit alone. A ring-barrow lies just 27 metres to the south-west, now separated from the bowl-barrow by a recently constructed double fence with trees planted along the middle. A larger cairn or tumulus occupies the summit of Frewin Hill to the east, and further ring-barrows at Balrath would be visible to the north were it not for intervening tree cover. Running in a rough semicircle from the north-east side of the ring-barrow around the bowl-barrow is a further earthwork of scarp, ditch, and outer bank, suggesting the two monuments were once part of a more deliberate arrangement on this hillside.