It was recorded before excavation as roughly nine and a half metres long, seven metres wide, and just over two metres high, which is modest enough for a prehistoric burial cairn but not implausible either. What makes the site genuinely curious is that, decades after it was dug into and catalogued, its basic character remains unresolved.

The excavation was carried out by O'Connell in 1937, and his interpretation was straightforward: a burial cairn, the kind of monument found across Ireland in which stone was heaped over one or more stone-lined graves. A cairn of this type typically covers cists, box-like chambers formed from upright slabs and roofed with flat lintels. O'Connell found three such cists, all capped with lintels. The southernmost was the most substantial, measuring around 1.8 metres long and plunging to a depth of 1.8 metres at its western end. Inside were stone chips, bone fragments he identified as human, and two pieces of sandstone he thought resembled arrowheads. The two cists to the north contained only stone infill, with no finds recorded. The burial interpretation seemed settled. But subsequent opinion has not been so sure. It has been proposed that the southern feature may actually be a corn-drying kiln, a simple agricultural structure used to dry grain before milling, and doubt has been cast on whether the bone fragments and sandstone pieces are what O'Connell believed them to be. The monument sits somewhere between a prehistoric grave and a field kiln, and no firm resolution has followed.