It sits at the centre of an embanked enclosure, one layer of deliberate arrangement nested inside another, which gives the whole structure an air of considered purpose. The trouble is that nobody is quite sure what that purpose was, or when it was put there.

A cairn, in the most general sense, is simply a mound of stones, and the form has been used in Ireland across several thousand years for burial, marking, and commemoration. This one, however, may be considerably more recent than it looks. Researcher Timoney, writing in 1984, proposed that this cairn and a nearby possible barrow could be nineteenth-century demesne monuments, constructed as landscape features on the Ormsby demesne. Demesne monuments of this kind were not uncommon among improving landlords of the period, who sometimes erected artificial antiquities, follies, or commemorative mounds in the grounds of their estates, borrowing the visual grammar of prehistoric Ireland for ornamental or sentimental effect. The unshaped field stones used here, ranging from fairly large to medium in size, are the sort of material that would have been abundantly available on any improving estate, cleared from fields and repurposed. If Timoney's reading is correct, what looks like prehistory is actually a piece of nineteenth-century landscaping, a constructed ruin rather than a genuine one.