Small enough to overlook entirely, measuring roughly 4.5 metres north to south and 3.5 metres east to west, and rising no more than 40 centimetres at its highest point, it has the ambiguous quality that makes certain prehistoric landscapes so quietly unsettling. It could be a cairn in the proper sense, a deliberate stone monument of the kind raised over burials or to mark territory in the prehistoric period. Or it could be something altogether more mundane: a field-clearance cairn, the accumulated result of generations of farmers simply piling stones removed from nearby ground to make cultivation easier. The two possibilities are not always easy to separate, and at Fanygalvan the mound's formless shape leans awkwardly against any confident identification.

The site sits within a large, multi-period field system, meaning the surrounding landscape carries the overlapping traces of farming activity from different eras, some prehistoric, some later. The mound was noted as long ago as 1961, when de Valera and Ó Nualláin included it in their survey work. It was later catalogued as 'Cairn F' by Grant in 1995, as part of a focused investigation into a concentration of prehistoric monuments clustered in the immediate area. That concentration is worth pausing on: two further cairns lie within roughly 75 metres to the west-northwest and 64 metres to the west-southwest respectively, suggesting that whatever activity shaped this plateau, it left multiple traces close together. Whether those traces represent a coherent prehistoric landscape or simply centuries of stone-clearing in a rocky part of Clare is a question the ground has not yet answered.