It is small enough to be easily walked past, yet its geometry is deliberate and complete: a raised circular platform at the centre, ringed by an inner ditch, with traces of an outer ditch beyond that, and a bank of earth and stone enclosing the whole arrangement on three sides. What makes it stranger still is that the Finglas River appears to have clipped the site on its south-south-eastern edge, partially eroding whatever once stood there.

A barrow is a burial mound or funerary earthwork of prehistoric origin, and the term covers a wide variety of forms. This example, studied by Michael Connolly as part of his 2008 doctoral research into the prehistoric settlement of the Tralee area, is compact but precisely configured. The central platform is circular, roughly 6.4 metres across and raised about half a metre above the surrounding ground. At its centre sits a small depression, approximately 1.7 metres by 1 metre and 0.22 metres deep, which may represent the original focus of the monument, the point around which everything else was arranged. The inner ditch, flat-bottomed and around 0.5 metres deep, is clearly legible on most sides. The outer ditch is fainter, surviving mainly to the west and south, and the bank itself, though modest at under half a metre in height, traces a coherent arc around the northern, southern, and western perimeter. The total footprint runs to roughly 16.5 metres north to south and 13.2 metres east to west. Scotia's Glen itself carries its own mythological weight, being associated in early Irish tradition with Scotia, a legendary Egyptian princess said to have been buried in Kerry, which lends the surrounding landscape an additional layer of antiquity, whether or not one takes the legend literally.

The site sits at the head of the glen and looks southward down it, a positioning that feels unlikely to be accidental. Prehistoric monuments are frequently oriented or placed with careful attention to topography, and the long view down the valley from this spot would have been as legible to its builders as it is today.