The OS six-inch series was the standard large-scale mapping of Ireland from the nineteenth century onwards, and it captured a remarkable number of earthworks, raths, and cairns across the country. That this one escaped entirely suggests it was either overlooked by surveyors or had already sunk so far into the landscape that it simply read as a bump in the ground.

The cairn is an oblong mound of stones beneath a covering of sod and turf, measuring roughly 5.6 metres along its longer axis and 3.6 metres across, rising to somewhere between 0.6 and 0.7 metres in height. Modest dimensions, but local tradition holds it as a burial site, and that tradition connects it, through legend, to two bowl barrows on a ridge in the neighbouring townland of Kilbride, about one and a half kilometres to the north-north-east. Bowl barrows are a type of prehistoric funerary monument, typically a rounded earthen mound enclosed within a ditch, and the pairing of such sites in local memory with a more obscure outlying cairn is a not uncommon pattern in the Irish landscape, where communities maintained oral associations between monuments long after any formal knowledge of their origins had faded. Adding further texture to the immediate area is a rath some 130 metres to the east, a rath being a circular earthen enclosure that typically served as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period. The cairn sits in pasture with a knoll to the west-north-west and rising ground to the north and west, though the land opens out to broad, low-lying pasture to the south.