Slightly irregular in outline and roughly six metres across at its widest point, it sits close to a larger neighbouring cairn to its east, the two monuments occupying the same landscape in a relationship that still prompts questions about how and why they were placed where they were.

A cairn, in the most general sense, is a deliberately constructed heap of stones, and in an Irish prehistoric context such monuments are most often associated with burial or ritual use, though their precise functions vary considerably from site to site. What makes this particular example worth closer attention is a feature recorded just seven metres to the east of its base: a stone packing measuring three metres by three metres, apparently consisting of a single layer of stones ranging from about twenty to thirty centimetres in size. The relationship between this packing and the cairn itself is not fully explained, though the proximity and deliberate arrangement suggest the two features are connected in some way. The description was published by Stefan Bergh in 1995, as part of his landscape study of the megalithic monuments of the Cúil Irra peninsula, a region of Sligo with an unusually dense concentration of prehistoric remains. The stones themselves are gneiss, a coarse-grained metamorphic rock common in the area, and the fieldstone construction gives the cairn a rough, unworked quality quite distinct from the more elaborate kerbed or chambered monuments found elsewhere in the same landscape.