Nobody is quite sure what it is. Measured in 1971 as roughly 13.6 metres east to west and 11.8 metres north to south, and defined by a steep scarp rising between two and two and a half metres, it is substantial enough to have been purposefully built, yet eroded and disturbed enough that the original intention is no longer obvious. One side has been quarried away from the east-southeast, and the top is irregular with hollows and secondary mounding, signs of disturbance over an unknown span of time.

The uncertainty at the centre of the site is genuinely interesting. An Anglo-Norman motte castle, built in the centuries following the twelfth-century invasion, would typically be accompanied by a fosse, a defensive ditch encircling the base, and a bailey, an adjoining enclosure where the associated buildings would have stood. There is no trace of a fosse here, and no remains of a bailey, though an area of higher ground to the west has been noted as a possible candidate for the latter. More telling is the mound's profile: mottes tend to be steep-sided and flat-topped, engineered for defence and for the timber tower that would have crowned them, whereas this mound has a gently sloping form that sits more comfortably within the tradition of prehistoric burial mounds. Slight traces of old field boundaries to the east and south, visible on the revised 1913 Ordnance Survey 25-inch map, hint at the longer agricultural history of the surrounding land, but shed no further light on the mound itself. Whether it covers a Bronze Age burial or the ghost of a medieval fortification remains an open question, one that only excavation could resolve.