Measuring roughly twelve metres in diameter, it takes the form of a ring-barrow, a type of prehistoric funerary monument in which a burial mound or flat central area is enclosed by a circular ditch and sometimes an outer bank. These monuments are generally associated with the Bronze Age, though they appear across a broad span of Irish prehistory. What makes this particular example quietly notable is how little attention it has attracted, surviving not through excavation or formal study but simply by persisting in the ground, its circular outline legible from above even as the bogland around it remains largely undisturbed.

The site was identified and reported by Jean-Charles Caillère, working from aerial imagery captured between 2011 and 2013 as part of the Ordnance Survey Ireland DigitalGlobe series. A second possible barrow lies approximately eighteen metres to the south-east, suggesting that what survives here may be the remnant of a small funerary grouping rather than a single isolated monument. Paired or clustered barrows are not unusual in the Irish landscape; communities across prehistory often returned to the same ground to bury their dead, gradually creating loose concentrations of monuments that reflect repeated use of a place over generations. That both features in Cloonteen remain only "possible" barrows reflects the limits of aerial identification alone, without ground survey or excavation to confirm what lies beneath.