The mound is roughly subcircular, measuring about 8.2 metres north to south and 7 metres east to west, and rises to between one and 1.4 metres at its highest. Intermittent kerbstones, the low edging slabs that originally defined the cairn's boundary, still break the surface here and there, hinting at the formal structure beneath. The surrounding terrain adds a quietly vertiginous note: about 80 metres to the south-east, the plateau drops sharply away to a cliff edge.

This cairn is one of nine clustered along the same hilltop, all of them set within what appears to be a large, multiperiod field system, meaning the landscape around them was shaped and reshaped across many different eras. The cairn itself contains a cist, a small stone-lined burial box, positioned to the north-east of the mound's centre. A slight natural berm just outside the eastern edge of the cairn drops away sharply to the surrounding ground level, lending the monument a subtle platform-like quality that may once have been more pronounced. The structure was already well-known enough by the late nineteenth century to be marked and named as 'Carn' on both the 1897 Ordnance Survey 25-inch plan and the 1920 edition of the six-inch map. The antiquarian T. J. Westropp, writing in 1913, recorded his belief that the cairn had at some point been opened by treasure-hunters, a fate that befell a great many such monuments across Ireland, and which may account for the disturbed appearance the mound presents today.