The mound measured roughly 37 metres in diameter, making it a considerable presence in the landscape. Today, however, it no longer exists. It was quarried away for sand, and what had survived for millennia was lost to the extraction work that first exposed it.

The mound was a tumulus, a broad term for an earthen or stone burial mound raised over the dead, and the burial it contained was discovered during that quarrying. Workers found a rectangular cist, a stone-lined grave box, holding cremated bone. This form of burial, where the body is cremated and the remains placed in a cist within a mound, is associated with Bronze Age practice in Ireland, though the precise dating of the Friarhill mound is not recorded. The find was noted by Walshe in 1931 and later referenced by the archaeologist John Waddell in 1990. At the time of discovery, the burial itself was not disturbed further, but the fate of the mound was already sealed. Subsequent quarrying removed what remained of it entirely.

There is nothing to see at Friarhill now. The site survives only in the archaeological record, a brief notation of something that was found and then lost. What the mound once signalled about the people who built it, and why they chose that particular confluence of valleys to inter their dead, can only be guessed at.