When the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1916, the feature was marked with hachuring, the conventional shorthand for a circular earthwork or mound of some antiquity. What it actually represents is considerably more mundane, though no less worth understanding: a clearance cairn, the accumulated result of generations of farmers picking stones from their fields and heaping them somewhere out of the way.

Clearance cairns are among the most routinely misidentified features in the Irish landscape. They lack the drama of a megalithic tomb or the obvious geometry of a ringfort, yet they turn up in archaeological records precisely because their shape can mimic something more ancient. This particular example is D-shaped rather than the circular form the old map implied, measuring roughly 8.2 metres on its northeast to southwest axis and 9.6 metres northwest to southeast. The straight eastern face distinguishes it from a naturally accumulated heap, and at the base sit some substantial stones with a diameter of around 0.8 metres. Inside that straight side, a large quantity of smaller, fist-sized stones have been thrown, suggesting the cairn was added to informally over time as the surrounding ground was worked and cleared. It is, in essence, a field's memory of itself, the physical record of effort spent making ground cultivable or passable.