Standing between 1.5 and 2 metres high, this ancient monument commands sweeping views across the mountainous terrain, a location clearly chosen for its commanding position. The cairn's somewhat disturbed appearance can be attributed to its later use as a trigonometrical station, when surveyors repurposed the site for mapping the Irish landscape.

Victorian antiquarian Kinahan noted the presence of a kistvaen, a type of stone burial chamber, within the cairn in 1889, though no trace of this feature remains visible today. Whether it was destroyed during the cairn's conversion to a survey point or had already vanished by that time remains a mystery. The absence of this internal structure makes it difficult to determine the cairn's original purpose with certainty; it could have served as a Bronze Age burial monument, a territorial marker, or perhaps fulfilled a ceremonial function for the communities who inhabited these hills thousands of years ago.

The cairn forms part of a rich archaeological landscape in this corner of Donegal, where prehistoric monuments dot the hillsides and valleys. Its preservation, despite centuries of weathering and human interference, offers a tangible connection to the area's ancient past. While many similar cairns throughout Ireland have been dismantled for building materials or damaged by treasure seekers, this example at Gortcally remains largely intact, continuing to mark the summit where our ancestors once gathered stones in a collective act of construction whose full meaning we may never fully understand.