The mound is only ten metres across at its widest and rises by less than a metre at its highest scarp edge, yet its position is unmistakably deliberate: whoever raised it chose a point where Nephin and the Nephin Beg range fill the south-western horizon, where Killala Bay opens to the east with the Ox Mountains behind it, and where Bartragh Island sits like a comma in the water below. A slight depression, set a little off-centre towards the north-east, dimples the flat top of the platform, a detail that often signals earlier disturbance or the subsidence of a burial chamber beneath.

A mound barrow of this kind is, in its simplest terms, a built earthen mound raised over a burial or as a monumental marker, a form of funerary or ceremonial architecture with roots reaching back into the Bronze Age in Ireland. This particular example has a scarp, essentially a cut or shaped edge defining the mound's perimeter, measuring 0.45 metres on the north side and rising to 0.65 metres on the south. Where erosion has worn away a section of the outer slope at the south-west, a kerb-like arrangement of small and medium-sized stones is visible at the mound's base, suggesting the original structure was more formally edged than its current weathered appearance implies. On the east and west sides, a low shelf or plinth projects outward from the mound's base, giving the whole thing the look of a raised platform when seen in profile. Whether this shelf is original to the monument or the accumulated result of farm activity is not entirely clear. Two large boulders embedded in the southern scarp are likely the product of field clearance rather than deliberate placement. The mound does not stand alone on this headland: a ringbarrow, a type of barrow defined by a surrounding circular bank or ditch, lies roughly 100 metres to the south-south-west, and a further mound sits about 120 metres to the north, the three monuments arranged loosely across the same ridge of undulating pasture between the Palmerstown River and the waters of Rathfran Bay.