It is not natural. Built from earth and stone, it is a mound barrow, a burial monument of the kind raised across Ireland during the Bronze Age, intended to mark the presence of the dead in a particular place and, in doing so, to anchor that place within a community's understanding of its own territory.

The mound sits at the base of a north-facing slope of a low hill, and it does not stand alone. A second mound lies to the south, and a ringfort, the remains of an enclosed farmstead typically dating from the early medieval period, sits to the south-west. The clustering of monuments like this is not unusual in the Irish countryside; earlier prehistoric features were often deliberately incorporated into later patterns of settlement and land use, suggesting that their significance, or at least their conspicuousness, was recognised long after their original purpose had been forgotten. The barrow itself has suffered some minor disturbance: the northern side shows signs of quarrying, and field-clearance debris, stones gathered from the surrounding land during agricultural work, has been piled against the eastern and western edges of the mound over the years.