What was once a raised earthwork of modest but deliberate proportions has been so thoroughly disturbed over the centuries that it no longer registers on modern aerial photography. It survives, if survival is the right word, somewhere between monument and memory.

When surveyors examined the site in 1970, they found a roughly circular raised area measuring approximately 13.7 metres from east-northeast to west-southwest and around 10 metres across in the other direction, its edges defined by a steep scarp rising to about 1.8 metres. A barrow, in this context, refers to a mounded earthwork raised over a burial, a form of funerary monument common across prehistoric Ireland and Britain. This particular example showed no trace of a surrounding fosse (a defensive or defining ditch) or an outer bank, and whatever original entrance it might have had was no longer legible in the landscape. More conspicuously, an elongated quarry hole ran from the centre of the interior outward to the southeastern perimeter, suggesting the mound had been dug into, perhaps for building material or out of curiosity, at some point after its construction. By the time of the revised Ordnance Survey 25-inch map of 1913, the earthwork was already described as suboval in shape, a subtle sign that its original form had already begun to soften. A possible second burial mound lies roughly 62 metres to the west-northwest, hinting that this hilltop may once have held greater significance than its present state suggests. The hilltop location and the earthwork's small diameter together led those who examined it to conclude it was most likely a prehistoric burial monument, though its original date and the circumstances of its construction remain unknown.

The site sits in pasture just east of the Sion Hill summit, with open views in all directions, which is itself a clue to its ancient purpose. Elevated ground was frequently chosen for burial monuments in prehistoric Ireland, whether to mark the landscape, to be seen, or for reasons we can no longer fully reconstruct. There is little to see on the ground now, and the monument is effectively invisible from the air.