A cairn is a mound of stones, often raised over a burial or used as a landscape marker in prehistoric times, and this one was originally circular. Today, the northern half has been removed entirely, leaving a semicircular arc of stones roughly six and a half metres across and barely sixty centimetres high. Along the south-eastern to south-western curve, traces of a kerb, the outer ring of larger stones that would once have defined the cairn's edge, are still visible. Elsewhere, perimeter stones sit embedded in the shallow bog, hinting at the full circumference of the original structure.

The cairn sits on an east-west ridge of gorse and heather-covered rock, a terrain that gives some sense of how exposed and deliberately placed such monuments could be. The western outlook over Glengarriff would have made this a conspicuous position in the prehistoric landscape, and the ridge itself still carries that quality of elevation and openness. Roughly two hundred metres to the north lies a separate hut site, suggesting this part of the mountain was once a place of some activity, with the cairn and the settlement existing in proximity, though whether they were contemporary is not recorded. Who removed the northern half of the cairn, and when, is unknown; stone robbing for field walls and building foundations was common throughout rural Ireland across many centuries, and a cairn of this kind would have offered a convenient quarry.