The original structure is an oval mound of mostly small loose stones, roughly thirteen metres north to south and eleven metres east to west, and standing about two metres high. Beneath the scatter of rubble, traces of larger stones laid horizontally suggest the remains of a kerb, possibly drystone-walling, that once enclosed a more defined circular area of around ten metres in diameter. A cairn, in the most basic sense, is a deliberate heap of stones raised over a burial or as a marker on the landscape; this one has the damaged, spread appearance of something very old that has been visited, and interfered with, across many generations.

The more recent layers of interference are just as telling as the prehistoric ones. At some point a rough shelter was built against the cairn on its eastern side, using stones taken from the monument itself. Separately, a modern cairn, nearly a metre and a half across and two and a half metres high, was piled directly on top of the original, the accumulated result of visitors adding stones in the customary way. Both additions complicated the archaeological picture considerably. Following a site inspection, the shelter was dismantled under archaeological supervision, as recorded by Coyne in 2003, and its stones were returned to the cairn. That remedial work also gave archaeologists a closer look at the kerbing. Rubble continues to be scattered down the slopes in all directions, a slow dispersal that makes it difficult to know exactly what the original footprint of the monument was.