It measures only about three and a half metres across and rises a little over a third of a metre from the surrounding ground, dimensions that make it far more subtle than the great passage tombs of the Boyne Valley. What sets it apart is its completeness: the mound is still encircled by an inner fosse, a shallow surrounding ditch roughly two and a half metres wide, and beyond that an external bank that survives to around forty centimetres in height. Together these three concentric elements, mound, ditch, and bank, define it as a ring-barrow, a form of funerary monument generally associated with the Bronze Age and Iron Age in Ireland, though individual examples vary considerably in date.

The ridge on which the barrow sits is glacial in origin, formed during the last ice age when deposits of till and gravel were laid down in long elongated mounds known as drumlins or eskers. There is some suggestion that this particular ridge may have been modified, whether by the people who built the barrow or at some other point, though the details remain uncertain. What is clear is that the location was deliberately chosen. Elevated ground along a natural landform would have made the monument visible across the surrounding landscape, which is consistent with how ring-barrows elsewhere in Ireland tend to be positioned. The grassland setting today gives the site an open, uncluttered quality that allows the earthworks to be read with unusual clarity.