An Ordnance Survey trigonometrical station was planted on its crest, a field fence was driven across its body sometime after 1837, and a mobile-phone mast was erected at its eastern base. And yet the mound endures, roughly circular, measuring around 32 to 33 metres in diameter and rising between 3.3 and 4.1 metres above the surrounding ground, its northern profile still largely intact and preserving the original, well-rounded form that centuries of interference have obscured elsewhere.

What exactly lies beneath the surface remains genuinely uncertain. When surveyed by David McGuinness in 2012, probing through the sod suggested the mound might be a cairn or stony tumulus, with a significant number of stones recovered from the ditches of the later field-fence, as though the fence-builders had simply quarried from the monument itself. A tumulus is a burial mound built primarily of earth, while a cairn is one composed mainly of stone; the distinction matters archaeologically, and here the evidence points ambiguously at both. McGuinness raised the possibility that this could even be a passage-tomb, a type of Neolithic chamber tomb typically approached by a roofed stone corridor, though no kerbstones or other defining features are visible at the surface. Earlier observers in 1978 and 1979 wondered whether the hill itself might be partly natural, with the prehistoric builders having raised only the upper portion. That question, too, remains open. What is not in doubt is the mound's place within a broader prehistoric landscape: from its summit, the Loughcrew hills in County Meath are visible to the north-east, as are barrows at Croghan and Ushnagh on the horizon, and Lough Owel lies just a kilometre to the east. Two small satellite barrows sit within ten metres of the main mound, and several further examples are scattered across the surrounding spurs and slopes of Frewin Hill, suggesting this was once a deliberate concentration of the dead, laid out in deliberate relation to one another and to the water and hills beyond.