It is easy to pass without a second glance, yet the shape beneath the grass is a ring barrow, a prehistoric funerary monument that has occupied this spot for perhaps three or four thousand years. A cluster of hawthorn trees now grows across it, giving it the look of an ordinary scrubby hillock rather than the structured thing it actually is.

A ring barrow typically consists of a central burial mound surrounded by a circular ditch, known as a fosse, with a low outer bank beyond that. This example measures roughly twenty metres across in total, with a central mound about four metres in diameter rising to just over a metre in height. The fosse and traces of the external bank are still legible in the ground, though the monument has not survived entirely intact. The centre has been disturbed at some point, and field-clearance material, the kind of loose stone gathered when a farmer tidies a pasture, has been tipped into the fosse on its western and northern sides. Recorded by McCaffrey in both 1952 and 1955, the barrow sits within a wider Bronze Age landscape in the west of Ireland where such monuments are not uncommon, though each one represents a deliberate choice of placement, this particular rise selected, presumably, for its outlook toward the water to the north.