The shallow hollow at the centre of this ancient burial mound is almost certainly the work of treasure-seekers, people who at some point decided that whatever lay beneath this circular earthwork was worth the effort of finding. They were not the first to take an interest in the spot. The monument they disturbed is a ring-barrow, a type of prehistoric funerary monument consisting of a central mound enclosed by a ditch and an outer bank, the whole arrangement intended to demarcate and honour the dead. What makes this particular example quietly peculiar is that it was not simply built on the landscape; it was shaped out of it.

The knoll on which the barrow sits is identified as a kame, a natural mound of sand and gravel deposited by glacial meltwater thousands of years before anyone thought to bury their dead here. Whoever constructed the monument recognised the prominence of the spot and worked with it, sculpting the surrounding ditch and bank so that the central mound rises above the ditch, and the ditch itself sits higher than the surrounding ground. The result is a stepped effect, almost architectural in its layering. When surveyed in 2013 and described by David McGuinness, the monument measured roughly 18 to 19 metres across in total, with a central domed mound of around 8 metres in diameter rising up to 0.9 metres above the ditch on its western side. Large boulders have been incorporated into various sections of the mound and bank, most visibly along the well-preserved western stretch. The northern and north-eastern sections of the outer bank have fared less well. The ground drops away steeply to the south-east, where the base of the knoll sits some 2.2 metres below the base of the bank, giving the monument a more dramatic profile from that direction than from any other. Frewin Hill is visible to the north-east. This barrow is not alone in the townland; three others have been recorded nearby, the closest sitting approximately 400 metres to the east, suggesting that Balgarrett once held some significance as a place where the dead were marked and remembered.