It does not announce itself. The ground is semi-karst, meaning the limestone beneath the thin soil is fractured and porous, and the mound blends easily into the general rubble of the hillside. Yet this is a prehistoric cairn, a deliberate accumulation of stone marking a burial or ritual site, and it is only one of nine such cairns strung along the same hilltop ridge.

The cairn is roughly oval in plan, measuring about eleven and a half metres east to west and nine metres north to south, and it varies noticeably in height: just forty to fifty centimetres at the northern edge but rising to a full metre at the east. Near the centre, a dislodged flat limestone slab points to the probable presence of a cist, the term for a stone-lined or stone-covered grave of the Bronze Age type. Further cavities to the north-north-east and south-south-west of centre may indicate additional cists, though the disturbance makes certainty difficult. The cairn appears on the Ordnance Survey twenty-five-inch map of 1897, labelled simply as 'Carn', and again on the six-inch edition of 1920, which at least confirms its visibility on the landscape over a century ago. At some later point, a small animal pen was built directly against the cairn's south-western side, the kind of opportunistic use of ancient stonework that was entirely common in post-medieval rural Ireland and that has left its mark on countless prehistoric monuments across the country.

The cairn sits within a large multiperiod field system, meaning the surrounding landscape carries traces of human activity from several different eras layered one over another. The cluster of nine cairns along this ridge makes the hilltop unusually dense with prehistoric remains, and the individual mounds vary enough in size and preservation that even a careful walk along the ridge reveals distinct characters in each.