What makes it unusual is not its appearance, which is unassuming at roughly six metres across and only thirty centimetres high, but what it is made of: heat-shattered stones and fragments of charcoal mixed through dark soil. This is a burnt mound, a type of prehistoric site found widely across Ireland and Britain, and thought to represent the remains of ancient cooking or heating activity. The method most commonly proposed involves heating stones in a fire, then dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring the water to the boil. Over repeated use, the cracked and spent stones were discarded into a heap, which is precisely what has survived here.

The mound sits adjacent to a spring in a natural basin of wet ground, tucked beneath a steep north-north-westward-facing ridge slope in what the 1919 Ordnance Survey six-inch map labels Carrowdangan Wood. The proximity to a reliable water source is typical of burnt mounds; the spring here drains away to the north-north-east, flanked on its eastern side by a field fence. A large willow tree now grows directly over the mound, its roots spreading across the surface and obscuring where the mound's edges actually lie. About 150 metres to the south, a rath crowns the ridge above. A rath is a roughly circular enclosure, usually defined by an earthen bank and ditch, and associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, though its relationship to the burnt mound below is not established.

The site sits in rough, scrubby woodland, and the combination of wet ground, spreading willow roots, and low profile means the mound is easy to overlook even at close range. The spring immediately to the east is perhaps the clearest landmark once you are in the vicinity, and the contrast between the firm, slightly raised ground of the mound and the soft surrounding terrain becomes more apparent underfoot than it does by eye.