At Coolnahay in County Westmeath, a low oval mound sits on a glacial knoll amid undulating pastureland, measuring roughly nine metres east to west and five metres north to south, rising to just 0.37 metres at its most defined southern edge. A fieldworker who visited in 1981 described it plainly: quite low, rather insignificant, with no real evidence that it is an antiquity. And yet it remains on the record, classified cautiously as a possible burial mound, a barrow being a prehistoric earthen or stone burial monument of a type found widely across Ireland and Britain.

The reason for that cautious acceptance is the company the mound keeps. Some 135 metres to the northeast, on a separate knoll, lies a confirmed ring-barrow with stepped construction, a more elaborate monument type typically associated with Bronze Age funerary practice. The proximity of the two features is what keeps the smaller mound in the conversation. A large stone was recorded beside it to the northeast as far back as March 1975, though a follow-up visit in April 1981 concluded it was probably of no significance, and by the time David McGuinness surveyed the site in 2013 the stone had vanished entirely, apparently removed in the intervening decades. Whether it was ever relevant to the mound's origins is now impossible to say. About 64 metres to the south, the picture grows more interesting. A curvilinear earthwork survives as an arc of broad bank, 57 metres long and up to five metres wide, curving from east to west before veering southward. The interior of this possible enclosure appears slightly dished, with the bank rising higher above the inside than the outside, suggesting deliberate shaping rather than natural accumulation. What would have been the rest of this circular earthwork appears to have continued under an adjacent road and into a ploughed field beyond, where it has since been destroyed.