It measures roughly six metres east to west, five metres north to south, and rises to about 1.3 metres. Whether it is genuinely ancient or simply rubble shifted during 20th-century maintenance works, nobody has been able to say for certain.

Innisfallen, the largest island on Lough Leane in Killarney, is best known for its monastery and the Annals of Inisfallen, a chronicle compiled there from around the 11th century onwards. The mound, noted by Barrington in 1976 as "the vestiges of a beehive hut", may represent a clochan, the Irish term for a dry-stone corbelled cell of the kind built by early Christian monks as individual dwelling or oratory spaces. These structures were assembled without mortar, each course of stone angled inward until the walls met overhead in a rough dome. They are found across western Ireland, most famously on Skellig Michael, and their presence on a monastic island would be entirely plausible. The difficulty here is that the mound is heavily overgrown and its origin remains ambiguous; Office of Public Works records apparently raised the possibility that it could instead be debris cleared during later maintenance of the site.

Visitors reach Innisfallen by rowing boat from Ross Castle, a short distance across the lake. The possible clochan lies near the modern pier along the eastern shore, so it is encountered almost immediately on arrival, before the better-documented monastery ruins further into the island. It is easy to walk past without registering it as anything other than a mossy hump in the undergrowth, which is perhaps part of what makes it worth pausing over.