At roughly eight metres across, the monument is easy to mistake at first glance for a ringfort, the circular enclosures associated with early medieval farming settlements. But the dished platform, the surrounding ditch, and above all the hollowed centre mark it out as something older and more enigmatic: a ring-barrow, a class of prehistoric funerary monument in which a low mound or platform is encircled by a ditch and sometimes an outer bank. Here the ditch survives especially well on the north-western side, dropping about twenty centimetres below ground level and rising to meet a platform that stands roughly forty centimetres above it. Where livestock have broken through the turf at the south-western edge, the construction is exposed as almost entirely earthen, with no trace of stone beneath.

The barrow was first identified as such by Elizabeth Fitzpatrick in 1997, and a more detailed survey carried out in 2013 and published by David McGuinness the following year placed it within a landscape that has been accumulating layers of significance for well over a millennium. About 150 metres to the north sits the ruined walled graveyard of Templepatrick, enclosing a unicameral, that is, single-chambered, medieval church measuring 13.8 metres by 8.1 metres. The quadrantal, roughly quarter-circle, shape of the graveyard led the scholar Leo Swan to argue, on the basis of comparative evidence published in 1988, that it preserves the outline of an early medieval curvilinear monastic vallum, the enclosing bank or rampart that typically defined an early Irish monastery. Somewhere outside the graveyard wall, a stone bearing what was described as St. Patrick's footprint was recorded in the nineteenth century, adding a further devotional thread to a place whose connections with the saint are embedded in the very placename. The surrounding terrain adds its own prehistoric dimension: a reedy depression to the north of the barrow is consistent with a kettlehole, a hollow formed when a block of glacial ice melted in place after the last Ice Age, and a second dry hollow to the south-west may have originated in the same way.

The survey team noted in 2013 that limited time on site left open the possibility of a second ring-barrow somewhere south of the church and graveyard, so the full extent of prehistoric activity in this corner of Westmeath may not yet be accounted for. The bog lying a short distance to the south-east, now partly planted with trees, would once have formed a more dramatic boundary to the monument's setting, and it is worth keeping that in mind when trying to read the place as its makers would have known it.