It measures somewhere between eight and ten metres across and rises no more than half a metre, with a gently domed profile that hints at deliberate shaping rather than natural accident. A barrow is a prehistoric burial mound, typically raised over the remains of the dead, though the form here is now too degraded to say with any certainty what type it once was or what it originally contained.

The mound appears on both the 1838 and 1922 Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, recorded as a small circular enclosure of roughly ten to fifteen metres in diameter, suggesting it was already a recognised feature of the landscape well before modern archaeology took an interest. What makes the location particularly striking is not the mound itself but the concentration of monuments surrounding it. Within a radius of roughly a hundred metres, the same knoll is neighboured by another possible barrow just fifteen metres to the north-north-east, a wedge tomb and two enclosures about fifty-five metres to the north-east, and two raths, one to the south-east and one to the north-west. A rath is a circular earthwork enclosure, generally associated with early medieval settlement and farming, while a wedge tomb is a much older megalithic burial structure, typically dating to the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age. The clustering of monuments from different periods around this single elevated spot suggests the area held some significance across a long span of prehistory and early history.

The knoll commands views in every direction: Rathfran Bay to the east, the Ox Mountains to the south-east, and the bulk of Nephin and the Nephin Beg range to the west and south-west. Whatever purpose the mound originally served, whoever raised it chose a position from which a great deal of the surrounding country could be seen and, presumably, from which the mound itself could be seen in return.