It measures less than five metres across and rises only about half a metre above the surrounding ground on its south-east side, where it can actually be measured at all. On the north-east, the edge of the mound dissolves so gradually into the natural slope of the land that no clear boundary can be drawn. A barrow of this kind, a mound raised over a burial or as a territorial marker during the prehistoric period, does not announce itself the way a passage tomb or a stone circle might. This one at Rathskeagh simply sits there, low and subcircular, its flat top giving little away.

When David McGuinness surveyed the site in 2013, he noted that the mound occupies a low but prominent east-west running ridge, a position that would have been deliberate. The ridge commands wide views in all directions, particularly to the north, and the choice of such a location for a monument of this type was rarely accidental. A low bank runs along the north side of the ridge close to the mound, and several other features nearby appear to belong to later periods. What makes the setting particularly layered is what lies just across the road to the east, on the same ridge: a much larger mound, one that carries evidence of structures on its upper surface and has been identified as a motte. A motte is the earthen mound at the core of a Norman fortification, typically topped with a timber tower or small keep, and they were built in considerable numbers across Ireland following the Anglo-Norman arrival in the late twelfth century. The two mounds on this ridge, then, represent entirely different worlds, one prehistoric, one medieval, occupying the same elevated ground centuries apart, each choosing it for much the same reason.