What survives is tentatively identified as a barrow, the kind of burial monument typically raised during the Bronze Age as a mark of significance over the dead. A subcircular ditch, roughly two metres wide and thirty centimetres deep, still traces an arc around a central mound about twelve metres in diameter, rising only sixty centimetres above the ditch floor. The qualification "possible" hangs over the whole thing, which is part of what makes it interesting: this is archaeology at its most honest, a site that has been so disturbed that certainty slips away.

The reef itself sits approximately three hundred metres west of a larger cairn and complex in the same area, suggesting this part of Kerry once held a cluster of monuments of some consequence. The commanding, unobstructed views the high reef affords, particularly to the south, are the kind of natural advantage that prehistoric communities tended to notice and use. A substantial north-south stone wall was built straight across the reef at some point, neatly cutting through the remains and almost certainly incorporating stone robbed from the very enclosures and banks it destroyed. The damage caused by agricultural reclamation, combined with decades of cattle grazing, has left the site heavily denuded and overgrown. Michael Connolly recorded these conditions during a survey of the Lee Valley area in 1996 and 1997, by which point the mound on the north-eastern side of the knoll had already been truncated by the field wall and was deeply obscured by vegetation.