A cairn is typically a mound of heaped stones, often raised over a burial or used as a landmark, and this one measures eight metres in diameter and just half a metre in height. It is an unassuming thing by any physical measure, yet its placement tells a more complicated story.

The cairn overlies the western corner of a hillfort enclosure, meaning that whoever raised the mound did so either without knowledge of the earlier structure beneath, or in deliberate relationship with it. Hillforts are large enclosures, usually defined by banks and ditches, associated broadly with the Iron Age in Ireland, though their dates and functions remain subjects of ongoing research. The fact that the cairn sits on top of the enclosure suggests it was constructed after the hillfort had already gone out of use, or at least after the enclosure boundary had lost whatever authority it once carried. The two features now occupy the same ground, one absorbed into the other across an unspecified stretch of time.