The cairn, built in drystone with a notable quantity of quartz stones, measures just 2.5 metres in diameter and stands only 0.4 metres high. A low bank arcs around it from northeast to south-southeast, with an estimated diameter of around 10 metres, though a forest track appears to have cut through what would have been its western half. At some point in recent times, someone placed a large upright stone on top of the cairn, an addition that sits somewhat awkwardly against the antiquity of everything around it.

The tradition attached to this place is that it marks the grave of Art O'Neill, a Gaelic lord who died in January 1592 while crossing the Wicklow Mountains in the depths of winter. O'Neill had escaped from Dublin Castle alongside Red Hugh O'Donnell in what became one of the most celebrated prison breaks of the Tudor period in Ireland. The two men were making for Glenmalure, a valley in the Wicklow uplands that served as a stronghold for the O'Byrne clan and a refuge beyond easy English reach. O'Neill, weakened and poorly equipped for the conditions, did not survive the journey. In 1935, Charles MacNeill recorded that local tradition in this part of Wicklow identified the cairn at Carriglinneen as his resting place. Scholarly opinion, however, generally points elsewhere, to a site called Art's Cross in Oakwood in west Wicklow, as the more likely location of his grave. MacNeill also noted that the site was known locally as "the Cloran", a name that may derive from the Irish ceallúrnán, meaning small burial ground, which would suggest the cairn had a commemorative or funerary identity quite apart from any association with O'Neill.

The cairn sits on a south-facing slope at the crest of a ridge, within forestry, with open views southward towards Ballinacor. That combination of modest physical remains and layered, contested memory is what makes it worth attention: a place that two different traditions have tried to claim, and that quietly predates both of them.