When the Record of Monuments and Places was compiled in 1996, it was listed as a cist, which is a type of stone-lined burial box typical of the Bronze Age, on the basis of a single map annotation by a man named Tom Coffey. Whether the original annotation was made carelessly or from a genuine misreading of the ground, the label stuck in the official file for years. The cairn itself measures roughly five metres north to south, four metres east to west, and sits no higher than about eighty centimetres above the surrounding rough pasture. Small whitethorn trees have established themselves around its south-western and northern edges, and a low grass-covered extension stretches out about two and a half metres from the eastern side.

The site sits within what is described as a large multiperiod field system, meaning the landscape around it has been shaped, divided, and used across several different historical periods, with boundaries and enclosures from quite different eras lying in close proximity. The cairn occupies semi-karst terrain, the kind of thin-soiled limestone upland that Clare is well known for, and from it there are wide views across a broad arc from north to south-east. Whoever piled these stones here, and whenever they did it, they chose a position that commands a considerable stretch of the surrounding countryside. One complication in reading the monument now is that many of the loose stones currently visible on top appear to have been added in modern times, making it harder to assess what the original structure looked like or what purpose it originally served.