That last detail is the unusual part: a low stone causeway, roughly three metres long, connects the two structures, and it is considered an original feature rather than a later addition. Two ancient cairns, deliberately linked, sitting together on a mountain top that falls away sharply on both sides into the valleys of Glendavoolagh and Glendorragha.

The cairn itself is broadly oval in plan, approximately eighteen metres across from north to south and fourteen metres east to west, and composed of loose quartzite blocks, the same metamorphic stone that makes up the mountain beneath it. At its highest point, on the western side, it rises to between two and a half and three metres. Large boulders along the south-eastern edge may once have formed a kerb, the kind of structural edging commonly seen on prehistoric burial mounds to retain the cairn material and define its boundary. The mountain's peat cover has largely eroded away over time, leaving the peak exposed, and the cairn is now only thinly mantled with peat in places. At some point the Ordnance Survey selected it as a trigonometrical station, and fragments of a concrete OS pillar still lie scattered across the cairn surface. More recently, someone has built a small modern cairn, about 1.2 metres high, directly on top of the south-western end of the ancient one, a well-meaning gesture that adds one more layer of accumulated human presence to a structure already carrying several thousand years of it.