The Ordnance Survey six-inch map names the place Crockaphuca, meaning Hill of the Pooka, after the shape-shifting trickster spirit of Irish folklore. That name alone suggests the site had a reputation long before anyone thought to measure it.

When David McGuinness surveyed the monument in 2013, he found a mound modest in scale, roughly 5.9 metres north to south and 5.4 metres east to west, rising no more than about half a metre on its western and south-eastern sides. The real height comes from the natural feature beneath it: the knoll below the mound reaches up to two metres on its northern side. McGuinness identified this knoll as likely a kame, a type of steep-sided hill formed from glacial sediment deposited by meltwater during the last Ice Age, and noted a kettle-hole lake nearby in the same field to the south-west. A kettle-hole forms when a buried block of glacial ice melts away, leaving a depression that often fills with water. The relationship between the mound and this glacial landform is not fully resolved. A fieldworker who visited in 1983 believed the knoll had been deliberately scarped and shaped by human hands, but McGuinness was unconvinced, except in the case of the north-eastern side, which has been badly damaged or sheared off close to a modern field fence. What is clear is that the mound's central hollow, roughly 2.5 metres by 2 metres, was not made by any geological process. The most straightforward explanation is that treasure-seekers got there first, and whatever they were looking for, the Pooka did not stop them.

The surrounding field adds another layer of texture to the site. Beneath the pasture grass, old cultivation ridges known as lazy-beds remain visible across the field. Lazy-beds, raised planting ridges typically used for growing potatoes, are a common feature of the pre-Famine landscape in Ireland, and their presence here suggests that the land was once worked intensively by people who farmed right up to the foot of the Pooka's hill without disturbing its reputation.