What looks at a glance like a natural rise in the landscape has been deliberately shaped: its base scarped, its summit levelled, the whole thing transformed into a flat-topped mound roughly 37 metres across and 1.5 metres high, ringed by a wide berm, the term for a flat ledge or shelf of earth between a mound and any surrounding earthwork. No outer fosse, the ditch that typically accompanies such features, has been identified here, which makes the form slightly unusual within its class.

This is a stepped barrow, a funerary monument type in which the body of the mound is shaped into one or more distinct horizontal terraces, giving it a tiered profile when viewed from the side. The scarping and flattening at Clooncleagh suggest that whoever constructed the monument worked with a pre-existing natural feature, modifying it rather than raising an entirely artificial heap of earth. The wide berm, measuring between three and five metres across, reinforces the sense of careful, deliberate construction. Barrows in general belong to prehistoric burial traditions found across Ireland and Britain, though the specific date and any burial deposits associated with this particular example are not recorded. What can be said is that the choice of location was not accidental: the hillock commands good views in every direction, a quality that recurs again and again at monuments of this kind, where visibility, both from and towards the site, seems to have mattered to those who built them.