The Ordnance Survey's six-inch edition of 1840 recorded it as a circular platform defined by a scarp, the kind of earthen feature that might easily be mistaken for a natural rise in the ground. By 1897, the twenty-five-inch edition had simplified it to a small circular mound. Then, on the later Cassini edition of the six-inch map, someone annotated it with the word 'Mote', placing it in the tradition of motte-and-bailey earthworks, the raised mounds introduced by the Normans from the late twelfth century onwards as the bases for timber fortifications. Whether this annotation reflects genuine documentary knowledge or a surveyor's best guess remains unclear, and the site is now catalogued as a burial mound, which points to an earlier, pre-Norman origin entirely.

This kind of cartographic ambiguity is not unusual for earthworks in the Irish midlands and west. A motte is a deliberate defensive construction, typically steep-sided and flat-topped, while a burial mound or barrow tends to be older, often dating to the Bronze Age or earlier, and rounder in profile. The fact that the same feature attracted both labels across different survey editions suggests it was either genuinely ambiguous in form, or that its function was simply unknown to those recording it. The mound sits approximately 200 metres north of the townland boundary with Ballyroe Upper, which gives it a fixed point of reference in the landscape even if its origins remain open to interpretation. The record was compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded in November 2021 as part of an ongoing effort to document such features before they are lost to land use change or gradual erosion.

The mound is on private pasture land, so access would require the landowner's permission. It remains visible on satellite imagery, appearing as a scrub-covered earthwork on Google Earth orthoimages and identifiable on Digital Globe imagery taken between 2011 and 2013. That covering of scrub, while it obscures the surface detail, is in some ways what has preserved the mound's outline over time. Anyone approaching it from the road should be aware that the surrounding land is actively farmed, and the mound itself, modest in scale, could be easily overlooked against the general unevenness of a grazed field. Looking for the slight rise in the ground and the denser patch of vegetation marking its crown is the surest way to locate it.