The older of the two is a prehistoric circular cairn, roughly eight metres in diameter, now so thoroughly absorbed into the shallow peat that only a scatter of stones protruding a few centimetres above the surface betrays its outline. The newer one, a squat cylinder four metres across and two metres high, sits squarely on the south-western half of the ancient structure, more or less erasing it where it stands.

The newer construction is known locally as Lord Bantry's Pile, and it was raised sometime in the eighteenth or nineteenth century not as a monument to the dead or a marker of territory, but as a practical aid to maritime navigation. Bantry Bay, stretching away to the south-east, was a significant anchorage and commercial waterway, and a clearly visible landmark on the high summit of Hungry Hill would have given sailors a reliable point of reference when making their approach. The material for Lord Bantry's Pile was almost certainly drawn from the prehistoric cairn already on site, which accounts for why so little of the older structure survives above the peat. Whoever built the navigation marker had a ready-made quarry beneath their feet, and they used it.

The result is an unusual kind of layering. The prehistoric cairn, a form of funerary or ceremonial monument typically associated with the Bronze Age, has been quietly cannibalised by a piece of Georgian-era infrastructure, and the two now share a summit that gives out over the same bay their builders, millennia apart, both had reason to care about.