The mound is mostly invisible when approached from the south, the ground falling away steeply enough that the monument only comes into view once you reach the summit plateau. What confronts you there is a slightly oblong earthwork, roughly eleven metres east to west and eight metres north to south, with steep sides worn ragged by cattle. Its odd shape has a complicated explanation, and the story of what lies beneath it is stranger still.

In 1931, the archaeologist R.A.S. Macalister and Ruby Murray excavated the mound in a single day with five labourers, digging a trench of roughly three metres across down from the top. Beneath the grass and soil they found the mound built largely of small field stones packed with earth. Around 0.76 metres below the summit, three overlapping slabs covered the capstone of a cist, a small stone-lined grave box, just 0.63 metres by 0.36 metres, oriented north to south. A cist of that scale is a recognisable Early Bronze Age burial type, a carefully constructed stone chamber for the dead, but what was inside complicated any straightforward reading. The east and west walls extended southward beyond the end wall, forming a paved extension, with a further slab outside it. Propped against the interior corners were two Early Bronze Age Food Vessels of the bowl tradition, one tripartite in form, the other ribbed. Scattered through the fill, and even above the capstone, were tiny fragments of an unburnt human skeleton, along with bones of rat and frog and two jet beads. Macalister and Murray concluded that the remains represented a defleshed and disarticulated skeleton, a body stripped of flesh elsewhere and then reburied here. The mound itself had already been disturbed before their arrival; the Ordnance Survey had at some earlier point levelled the summit and cast material down the southern and eastern sides when establishing a bench-mark on it, and Macalister's own measurements suggest the northern and southern extents have been trimmed by several metres since even his time. Locals in the 1930s held a belief that the monument dated to the period of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, the great Ulster cycle cattle-raid epic. A few fields to the west lies the townland of Farra, identified as the place called Forrach in the Book of Leinster, where Fiachra, brother of Niall of the Nine Hostages, supposedly died and was buried after being wounded on a raid into Munster. The hilltop commands a wide view: Frewin Hill to the south, Lough Owel and Knockdrin to the south-east, Lough Iron to the west.