It measures roughly twelve metres east to west and seven metres north to south, rising to just over a metre at its highest point, which makes it easy to overlook from a distance. That hollow at the centre, however, is a clue that someone got here before any modern surveyor.

A mound barrow is a prehistoric burial monument, essentially a raised earthen covering placed over one or more interments, and this one yielded its secret during an investigation recorded by Fitzgerald in 1858. When the mound was dug into, excavators found a cist, a stone-lined burial box, measuring seven feet by three feet and containing a human skeleton described at the time as being in good preservation. Cist burials of this kind are typically associated with the Bronze Age in Ireland, a period roughly spanning 2500 to 500 BC, when the practice of placing the dead beneath constructed mounds was widespread across the island. The skeleton found here has long since passed out of the written record, but the disturbed hollow that marks the spot of the opening remains visible in the mound today.