The mound, known in Irish as Leacht Mhaire Ní Thuathail, is modest in scale, roughly three metres north to south, 1.6 metres east to west, and just over a metre in height. It is partially degraded now, its flat top worn and its edges softened, but its origins are precise and entirely human in character. A woman being carried to Boyounagh graveyard, roughly 410 metres to the northeast, slipped from the shoulders of her pall-bearers at this spot. According to local tradition, what followed was the straightforward expression of a widely observed rural custom: wherever a corpse was set down during a funeral journey, those accompanying it would raise a pile of stones to mark the place.

The custom itself, and this particular cairn, were recorded in the Ordnance Survey Letters by O'Flanagan in 1927, where the site was described as a large ash tree with a cairn of stones around its base. The ash tree was planted there afterwards by a friend of the woman, a gesture of personal remembrance layered on top of the communal one. By the time local researcher Kinght documented it around 1975, the tree had long since become part of how the place was understood and described. The name Leacht Mhaire Ní Thuathail, essentially the memorial cairn of Mary O'Toole, preserves her identity in a landscape where she might otherwise have left no trace at all.

The mound sits on a ridge slope in open grassland, close enough to Boyounagh graveyard that the interrupted journey feels almost tangible. The ash tree that once defined the site may no longer be present in the form originally described, given the decades of change since the earliest records, but the low earthen mound itself remains as the more durable element of this unplanned memorial.