Oval in plan, roughly 21 metres north to south and 17 metres east to west, and standing about 2.5 metres at its highest northern point, it has the profile of a cairn, the type of ancient burial or memorial mound typically built from heaped stone. Whether the core of this particular example is predominantly earth or stone, however, remains unclear. It is so thoroughly sod-covered, and so thickly colonised by hazel, hawthorn, gorse, and brambles, that the underlying material has never been properly determined. The vegetation is not merely decorative neglect; it is the reason a basic question about the mound's construction cannot yet be answered.

What the surrounding landscape does make plain is that people have been arranging space around this mound for a very long time. Later field boundaries have grown up against it rather than through it. One boundary along the eastern and southern base follows the curve of the cairn itself, as though whoever set it out was unwilling, or perhaps unable, to cut across the older structure. Another boundary skirts the western side on a rough north-south axis, and vestiges of an east-west fence appear on the north-facing slope. The mound sits on a rise in gently undulating terrain, with open views northward across rolling pasture and Nephin Mountain visible on the far horizon to the south-south-west. That combination of elevated position and long sightlines is a familiar feature of prehistoric monuments across the west of Ireland, though it proves nothing here about age or purpose.