What makes it unusual is not simply its age or its damaged condition, but the strange combination of forms it seems to embody: a roughly rectangular earthen enclosure, complete with an external ditch and a raised interior, with what looks like a ring-barrow, a burial mound encircled by its own ditch and outer bank, tucked inside it at the northern end. Ring-barrows, a prehistoric funerary monument type in which a central mound is enclosed by a circular earthwork, are not uncommon in Ireland. Rectangular enclosures containing them, however, are another matter entirely.

The monument was surveyed and described in detail by David McGuinness in 2015. The outer enclosure measures roughly 30 metres north to south and 25 metres east to west, with traces of a counterscarp bank, a secondary bank on the outer edge of a ditch, visible on the north-east and southern sides. The interior sits raised above the surrounding ground level. Inside, at the northern end, lies the heavily disturbed mound, some 6.5 metres in diameter, with remnants of a surrounding ditch and outer bank. It has clearly been ransacked at some point, the central mound hollowed and largely flattened. An earlier field observation from April 1970 suggested that the concentric arcs visible here might represent a two-period house site rather than a burial monument at all, with one structure built inside an older one. A subsequent visit in 1972 also queried the ring-barrow identification. McGuinness, however, argues for the funerary interpretation, noting that the hilltop sits within the Killucan group of barrows, a recognised concentration of prehistoric burial monuments in this part of Westmeath, with related monuments in nearby Rathwire Upper townland and a tight cluster of four or five others within Rathnarrow itself, all within about 1.2 kilometres to the south. The presence of other enclosed ring-barrows elsewhere in Ireland lends further weight to that reading, even if the rectangular form of the outer enclosure remains an awkward detail that no one has yet fully explained.