It is, in fact, a ring-barrow, one of three clustered in this landscape, and the best preserved of the group. The overall structure spans 29 metres north to south, a figure that gives some sense of the ambition involved in its original construction, even if the mound itself rises only 0.6 metres above the surrounding ground.

A ring-barrow is a Bronze Age funerary monument, typically consisting of a central mound covering a burial, surrounded by a circular ditch and an outer earthen bank. At Graiguenoe, the flat-topped mound has a base diameter of 11.5 metres, narrowing to 5 metres at the top. Around it runs an inner fosse, that is, a ditch, roughly 1.5 metres wide at the base and up to 3 metres wide at its upper edge. Beyond that sits an outer bank, lower and broader, measuring 6.5 metres at its base. Two companion ring-barrows lie 54 metres to the north-east and east respectively, though this one survives in better condition than either. The site was identified through a series of aerial photographs taken between 1971 and 1989, which is a reminder of how much of Ireland's prehistoric landscape remained formally unrecorded until relatively recently, visible from the air long before it was catalogued on the ground.

The location on open, level pasture means the monument has good visibility in all directions, which may well have been a deliberate choice by those who built it. That quality of openness also makes the small tree on the mound's northern quadrant all the more noticeable, a detail that seems to belong to a different timescale entirely.