Centuries of grazing animals have eaten away at its outer edges, and weathering has done the rest, leaving a curious form: a raised central core of soil, held together largely by the roots and shelter of thorn trees, surrounded by a lower eroded shelf known as a berm. The intact central section still rises around 2.6 metres above the surrounding ground on its northern side, which is a remarkable survival given the degree of damage elsewhere. The mound's original diameter cannot now be measured directly, but is estimated at sixteen metres or more.

A tumulus of this kind, a mound barrow, is one of the oldest monument types in the Irish landscape, typically raised over a burial or series of burials in the prehistoric period. When David McGuinness surveyed this example in 2013 and published his findings the following year, he noted that the mound had once been clearly circular or oval in outline, as shown on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map. That earlier record also reveals something quietly interesting about the surrounding landscape: a long boundary fence, comprising a bank and ditch and traceable for over two kilometres, runs north-west to south-east past the south-western side of the mound and appears, from the map evidence, to have originally clipped or run across its edge. This fence marks the townland boundary with Parcellstown to the south, and McGuinness concluded that it was presumably laid out with the tumulus as a reference point, a common enough practice that speaks to how persistently these ancient mounds shaped the human geography around them. On the north-western side of the mound, an irregular pit measuring roughly thirteen by twelve metres has eaten further into the perimeter, possibly the scar of an old quarry.

The mound sits on a low hilltop in open pastureland, and despite its battered condition it still commands a clear view northward and north-eastward, with Frewin Hill prominent in that direction. That placement was almost certainly deliberate: barrows across Ireland and Britain were frequently sited on elevated ground where they would be visible from a distance, marking both territory and the presence of the dead within the landscape.