The cairn is an oval mound of heaped stone, roughly 22 metres from north to south and 42 metres from east to west, and it survives to a height of about 2.7 metres, though considerably reduced from what it once was. The bunker, built in the 1940s, intrudes on the eastern side; the whole complex now sits within forestry.

The reduction matters, because the cairn was once considerably more imposing. A record from 1886 described it as standing 19 feet high, a pillar of stones still rising from the top. By that point, however, it had already suffered its most dramatic interference. In 1832, several hundred tons of stone were removed from the mound, and during this clearance a cist was discovered inside it. A cist is a small stone-lined burial box, typically of prehistoric date, constructed to hold human remains and sometimes grave goods, and their presence inside large cairns is a common feature of Bronze Age funerary monuments across Ireland and Britain. The 1832 discovery was recorded by the antiquarian W. C. Borlase in 1897, though by then the damage to the mound was already long done. How many tonnes of material were carted away, and to what purpose, the record does not say.