The Curragh is best known as the great open plain of County Kildare, cropped short by grazing sheep and threaded with racehorse gallops, but the ground beneath it holds older stories. On a low knoll at the foot of an east-facing slope, where the land drops towards a small north-south valley, sits a stepped barrow: a type of prehistoric burial mound distinguished by its tiered profile, with a narrow flat shelf, or berm, separating the upper platform from the outer scarp below. It is an unusual form, and this particular example is one of the quieter presences on a plain that has been continuously used, and continuously altered, for millennia.

The mound is modest in scale and not especially well preserved. Its base measures roughly nineteen metres north to south and sixteen and a half metres east to west, while its height reaches only about ninety centimetres above the surrounding ground. The upper surface, some nine by eight metres across, is set off by a berm roughly one to one and a half metres wide, beyond which the ground drops away in a low scarp. That stepped arrangement is what gives the monument its classification. Disturbance has occurred on both the western and eastern sides, the result of centuries of activity on one of Ireland's most intensively used stretches of open ground. The mound first came to formal attention through aerial photography carried out in 1999, which revealed its shape from above more clearly than ground-level inspection allows.