The Record of Monuments and Places listed the site as a fulacht fiadh, a type of ancient cooking site typically identified by mounds of fire-cracked stone and evidence of burning, but when the ground was examined more closely, no such evidence was found. The most likely explanation is that the scattered red sandstone covering the scree-like slope was mistaken for the burnt stone characteristic of a fulacht fiadh. What the site actually preserves, in a much reduced form, is a barrow, a burial mound of the kind raised across Ireland during the Bronze Age, consisting of a raised central platform enclosed by a fosse and an outer bank.

The barrow was identified from aerial photographs taken in 1949 by the Irish Air Corps and again in 1962 by Hunting Surveys Ltd., which is itself a reminder of how much of Ireland's archaeological landscape was first mapped from the air rather than on foot. By the time Michael Connolly examined the site as part of his doctoral research at University College Cork, published in his Tralee Area Monument Catalogue in 1996, the damage was already considerable. A field in which the barrow sits had been planted with deciduous trees, which effectively buried the eastern and western portions of the monument beneath new growth. Worse, a narrow strip running through the centre of the site had been pressed into use as an access track, and the repeated passage across it had substantially flattened what remained. The central platform still measured 13 metres north to south, though only a 4-metre-wide band of it was left untouched. The surrounding fosse was recorded at 3.5 metres wide, and the enclosing bank, roughly 4 metres across, still sat about 0.4 metres above the surrounding ground. The site commands a wide view from east through north to west, which may well have been a deliberate choice by whoever raised it.