That ambiguity is not a failure of archaeology so much as its most honest condition. Two barrows already exist in the area, the kind of low earthen funerary monuments raised during the Bronze Age to mark the dead, and it is their lesser-known neighbour, a circular patch of dense scrub some thirty metres south of the more westerly of the two, that has attracted cautious speculation.

The archaeologists Ruaidhri de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, documenting the megalithic and funerary monuments of Connacht, noted the circular bushy area in their 1972 survey and suggested it may have concealed a third mound beneath the overgrowth. It was a reasonable inference: prehistoric barrows across Ireland frequently survive as low, grassed or scrub-covered rises that look, to the untrained eye, like nothing more than a thicket or a slight swelling in a field. When the site was visited in February 1985, however, the clump of dense vegetation was entirely inaccessible, and no conclusion could be drawn about whether anything of archaeological significance lay within it. The question, as far as the record goes, remains open.