It is nearly twenty metres across and close to three metres high, its steep sides overgrown, its flat top giving it the quiet purposefulness of something deliberately made. A shallow fosse, a defensive or boundary ditch, traces a ring around its base, roughly three metres wide, reinforcing the sense that this was once a considered piece of landscape engineering rather than a natural feature.

The mound is a barrow, a burial monument of a type found throughout prehistoric Ireland, though the precise period of this example is unconfirmed in the available record. What is clear from the dimensions and form is that it was constructed with intention: the flat summit, the encircling fosse, and the steep, regular sides all point to deliberate shaping. Its position, overlooking the Corrib on land that slopes gently westward, suggests it may once have occupied a more prominent place in the local landscape than the surrounding development now allows it. Killanin and Duignan noted it as long ago as 1967, which means it was already recognised as an archaeological feature before the city grew further around it.