What makes it quietly awkward to classify is precisely what draws attention to it: the centre is built up high, which is not how ringforts work. Ringforts, the circular enclosures that dot the Irish countryside in their thousands, typically enclose a flat interior used for habitation or livestock. This one inverts that logic, with the interior rising rather than sitting level, and a surrounding ditch reinforcing the impression of something older and different in purpose. Writing in 1985, local researcher T. Coffey noted it looked "very like a bell barrow or tumulus," and that description has stuck.

A bell barrow is a type of prehistoric burial mound, rounded at the top and separated from its surrounding bank by a flat platform or berm, a form associated broadly with Bronze Age funerary traditions. The mound here is subcircular, measuring roughly 25 metres west-northwest to east-southeast and 23 metres in the perpendicular direction. Its enclosing bank, composed of stone and earth and most clearly visible in the northern half, stands between 0.6 and 1 metre high, with a base width of four to five metres narrowing to about a metre at the top. The interior, now heavily overgrown, appears hollow rather than solid, and a low scarp curves east to west through the southern sector. A later field wall, built with no apparent concern for what lay beneath it, bisects the whole monument from west-northwest to east-southeast, a common enough fate for prehistoric earthworks repurposed as convenient boundary lines by later farmers. Several further banks press against the exterior of the enclosing bank to the east and east-northeast, suggesting a history of activity around the site that has not been fully unpicked. Around 70 metres to the northwest stands a tower house associated with Glencolumbkille Castle, and roughly 100 metres to the north-northwest lies a separate enclosure, so the mound sits within a cluster of monuments that spans several periods without any of them being straightforwardly explained by the others.