Twenty-one metres across and rising to between ninety centimetres and a metre and a half at its highest point, it is substantial enough to demand attention, yet ambiguous enough to resist confident interpretation. A cairn, in its most basic sense, is a deliberate accumulation of stones, most commonly associated with prehistoric burial or territorial marking, but this one carries an additional, intriguing qualification: it may have been adapted as a landscape feature at some point in its history, suggesting that later hands found a use for it beyond whatever its original purpose was.

Some possible kerbstones remain in place at the northern and south-western edges, kerbstones being the upright or close-set stones that were often used to define the boundary of a cairn and hold its mass in position. Their partial survival hints at a more formally constructed monument beneath what now appears as a rough, weathered heap. Whether the adaptation involved reshaping the mound for aesthetic or practical reasons is not recorded, but the phrase itself opens up a long span of possible human intervention, from prehistoric reuse through to post-medieval estate landscaping, none of which can be firmly confirmed from what survives on the surface.