Roughly circular, measuring about eleven metres in diameter, and ringed by trees that were already established when the first Ordnance Survey mapped it in 1837, the site looks at first glance like a barrow, the low mounded burial monuments found across Ireland from the Bronze Age onwards. But whether it ever functioned as one is genuinely uncertain.

When the site was examined on the ground in 1980, what surveyors found was an inner earthen bank and an outer fosse, the fosse being the shallow encircling ditch that typically accompanies such earthworks. The bank survives mostly on the northern and western arc, while a large, deep depression on the southern and eastern side is attributed not to archaeology but to the cutting of the Royal Canal, whose construction would have disturbed the surrounding ground considerably. The fosse itself, narrow and shallow, has unusually sharp edges, which is taken as a sign that it may be relatively recent rather than ancient. No entrance through the bank is visible. The interior is level. All of this leaves the monument in an awkward interpretive position: the earthen features may not be original at all, and the whole thing could instead be a designed landscape feature connected to Belmont House, which stands about 260 metres to the south-west. Estate owners in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries frequently created ornamental earthworks, tree-planted mounds, and decorative enclosures in their grounds, and the triangular clump of trees now obscuring the site from aerial photography would sit comfortably within that tradition. A tree-ring, a separate circular arrangement of trees that may mark another earthwork or simply a planting feature, lies roughly 67 metres to the north-east, adding one more ambiguous element to the immediate landscape.