It is only a metre and a half high, with a flat top and steep sides, measuring roughly thirteen metres at its widest and ten metres north to south at its base. Modest by any standard, and yet something about its deliberate shape and elevated position suggests it was not always simply part of the landscape.

The mound is classified as a possible barrow, the general term for a burial mound raised during prehistoric times, often to mark the interment of the dead and to claim the surrounding land in the process. What complicates the picture here is its later history. On the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a trigonometrical station is marked at this precise spot, one of the surveying reference points used to fix heights and distances across the country during that great mapping exercise. The spot height recorded is 263 feet. More intriguingly still, the surrounding area is annotated as the "Fair Green", suggesting the mound sat within a space used for local markets or gatherings well into the nineteenth century. Whether the mound was already a landmark that drew such activity to it, or simply a convenient elevated point in an otherwise flat area, is not recorded. Two ringforts lie close by, one roughly 130 metres to the north-west and another about 330 metres to the east-south-east, hinting that this corner of Westmeath carried significance across several different periods.