Oval in plan and measuring roughly 21 metres on its long axis and 16 metres across, it survives to a height of only about 1.5 metres, which is modest enough, but the more striking thing is how thoroughly it has been disrupted. The walls of a later ringfort, a type of circular enclosed settlement common in early medieval Ireland, cut directly through the cairn's fabric. The two monuments occupy the same hilltop in an uneasy overlap, each partially undoing the other.

The cairn sits in the north-western quadrant of a hilltop enclosure, and the ringfort lies immediately to its south-east, its construction evidently cannibalising the older mound for convenient building material. That pattern of reuse is not unusual in Irish archaeology, where prehistoric cairns, essentially large stacked-stone burial or memorial monuments, were frequently quarried by later builders who had little sense, or little concern, that the material beneath their feet was anything other than a convenient pile of rock. Aerial photography has complicated the picture somewhat: two small cairns to the north-east of the main monument might be nothing more than field clearance heaps, but the photographic evidence raises the possibility that they occupy the footprint of a second cairn, one that was robbed out entirely. Byrne and Gosling, writing in 1988, noted this ambiguity, and it remains unresolved.