It measures roughly 13 metres north to south and 17 metres east to west, rising to just under two metres at its highest point, though it has been partially levelled over time. What makes it quietly remarkable is less its size than its company: this is one of four such mounds grouped together in the same field, a cluster of prehistoric burial monuments known as tumuli, the plural of tumulus, which are essentially mounds of earth heaped over the dead, sometimes containing chambers or cremated remains beneath.

The mound sits to the south of an old burial ground and not far from a cist, which is a small stone-lined grave box of a type associated with the Bronze Age in Ireland. The proximity of these different monument types, the four barrows, the burial ground, and the cist, suggests that this particular stretch of the north Cork landscape held some significance over a long stretch of time, with the dead of different periods drawn, or directed, to the same general ground. That kind of accumulated use is not unusual in Irish prehistory, where earlier monuments often attracted later burials, as though the presence of the ancestral dead conferred a kind of sanctioned gravity on a place.