It is an embanked barrow, a prehistoric funerary monument consisting of a roughly circular bank of earth and stone enclosing a central area, the whole thing measuring somewhere between ten and eleven metres across. The bank itself is relatively modest, rising about half a metre on the interior side and slightly less on the exterior, but what catches the eye is the way it slopes inward so smoothly and continuously that the enclosed space appears gently concave, like a shallow dish pressed into the ground. There is a break in the bank on the south-south-east side, roughly two metres wide, though whether this was always an entrance or is simply the result of centuries of degradation is not clear. A single hawthorn grows at the north-east edge, the kind of solitary tree that tends to establish itself at old earthworks and linger there long after everything else has changed around it.

This monument does not sit alone in the landscape. About twenty metres downslope to the west, a mound barrow occupies the same gentle hillside, the two monuments forming a loose pairing that suggests this corner of Mayo was deliberately chosen, at some point in prehistory, as a place for the dead. Further west still, roughly 550 metres away on a prominent ridge, a standing stone marks the horizon. The cluster implies a wider ritual or commemorative landscape, the kind where monuments were placed in visible relationship with one another rather than scattered at random. The views from the embanked barrow are described as good but not extensive, the surrounding land rolling away into wet ground to the north-east, which may itself have held significance for the people who built here, low-lying wet areas being frequently associated with prehistoric ritual activity across Ireland.