Yet what survives here is a pond barrow, a relatively rare funerary monument type in which the enclosing bank was deliberately built from earth scraped out of the interior, leaving a sunken central area rather than a raised mound. The effect, over millennia of weathering, is subtle to the point of near-invisibility, which may be one reason these sites have received less attention than the more conspicuous round barrows that punctuate the Irish landscape.

The site came to light in 2000, during pre-development testing of the area, when archaeologists identified the low oval enclosure and began to understand what it contained. The bank had been formed by scraping material from the interior, a deliberate inversion of the more familiar mound-building tradition. Fragments of cremated bone were recovered from the top of the bank, and a large pit cut into the north-eastern quadrant held both burnt bone and undecorated potsherds, plain pottery sherds whose lack of ornament makes precise dating difficult but places them broadly within prehistoric funerary practice. Perhaps the most unexpected find was a fragment of a porphyry stone axe, also located across the top of the banks. Porphyry is a distinctive igneous rock with visible crystals set in a finer matrix, and stone axes of this type are associated with the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age. That a portion of one ended up deposited here, among the cremated remains, suggests the object carried some significance beyond its original function. The finds are documented in a report by Seaver and Keeley, published in 2002.

Laughanstown sits in an area that has seen considerable suburban expansion in recent decades, and the landscape context of this monument has changed substantially since the pre-development testing that first revealed it. Anyone hoping to visit should be aware that access and visibility on the ground will depend heavily on what development has taken place in the immediate vicinity. The monument itself is unassuming by nature, and without prior knowledge of its form, the shallow interior and low encircling bank could easily be passed over entirely.