It measures twenty metres across and rises to about 1.6 metres at its highest point, which makes it a substantial presence on the hill, yet it gives almost nothing away. There is no visible kerb, the ring of stones that typically edges a prehistoric cairn and helps define its shape, and no trace of any internal structure has been identified. Whatever was once placed or buried here, if anything was, remains entirely unknown.

Cairns of this kind are generally associated with prehistoric funerary or ritual activity, sometimes covering a burial chamber, sometimes apparently not. They were built by heaping stone, and occasionally earth and turf, into a mound that could mark a grave, a boundary, or simply a prominent place. The fact that the lower portion of this one is now covered in peat suggests it has been slowly settling into the hillside for a very long time, the bog gradually encroaching and obscuring whatever the original builders left at its base. Without excavation, it is impossible to say whether the absence of a kerb reflects the cairn's original design or simply the degree to which the structure has degraded and been buried over the centuries.