The mound rises only about a metre from the surrounding ground, and there is no encircling bank, no fosse, and no visible internal structure to betray its origins. It looks, in other words, like exactly the kind of earthwork that an eighteenth-century landscape designer might have shaped deliberately to give a demesne a certain antiquarian atmosphere.

The truth proved more complicated. At the beginning of the twentieth century, workers extracting sand from the north-east side of the mound uncovered human bones, including three skulls. That discovery is recorded by Price in 1937, and it confirms what the circular form already suggested: this is a burial mound, a type of monument associated in Ireland with prehistoric funerary practice, typically constructed as a raised earthen covering over one or more interments. The absence of a fosse, the shallow profile, and the lack of identifiable internal features make precise dating difficult, but the deliberate circular platform is consistent with a class of monument that appears across the Irish landscape from the Neolithic onwards. What makes this particular example quietly odd is the later chapter in its story: the mound appears to have been incorporated as a tree-ring into the designed landscape of the Goldenfort demesne during the eighteenth century, when landowners across Ireland and Britain were reshaping their grounds according to fashionable naturalistic ideals. A ring of trees planted on a pre-existing mound would have provided exactly the kind of composed, atmospheric grouping that such landscapes favoured, and the ancient earthwork beneath would have lent the planting a pleasing irregularity without anyone necessarily asking too many questions about its origin.