A barrow is a burial mound, typically prehistoric, and this one carries all the visual hallmarks of the type. The trouble is, it is nothing of the sort. When the National Museum of Ireland examined it in November 1975, investigators concluded that the mound was a relatively modern landscaping feature, something deliberately shaped to evoke antiquity rather than actually being ancient.

What makes the site genuinely strange, however, is what the landscapers unwittingly built upon, and with. Beneath and around the mound lay a cemetery of extended, unaccompanied single burials, meaning bodies laid out individually without grave goods, the dating of which remains unknown. Worse still, the material used to raise the decorative mound incorporated disarticulated bones disturbed from the surrounding graves. The 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map records the circular enclosure clearly, suggesting the landscaping had already been completed by that point, though no record appears to survive of who commissioned it or why. Further burials from the same cemetery came to light in 1969, when they were encountered in a sand pit roughly 130 metres to the east, indicating the extent of the original burial ground was considerably larger than the mound's footprint alone would suggest. The name of the hill adds its own quiet layer of unease: Gallows Hill points to a history of execution, a common enough place-name in Ireland but one that here sits alongside an actual, if undated, cemetery in a combination that resists easy explanation.