At half a metre high, with a base diameter of eight metres and a flattened summit only four metres across, it is modest by any reckoning, yet its proportions are intact and its form is clear, which is more than can be said for many prehistoric earthworks that have been ploughed, quarried, or simply forgotten into the ground.

This is a mound barrow, a type of burial monument generally associated with prehistoric funerary practice, in which earth and sometimes stone were raised over the remains of the dead. What makes this particular example quietly interesting is its restraint: there is no enclosing fosse, the term for the ditch that typically surrounds such features, and no external bank. It stands as a plain earthen dome on flat, poorly drained land, with none of the additional architectural elaboration that often accompanies these monuments. Just forty-five metres to the east lies a ring-barrow, a related but distinct form in which a low mound is encircled by a bank and ditch, making the two monuments near-neighbours across the same soggy ground. Whether they were raised in the same period or by successive generations using the same landscape is not recorded, but their proximity suggests this corner of Westmeath held some significance to the communities who shaped it.