It measures roughly nine metres across and stands four and a half metres high, ringed by a shallow external fosse, which is a ditch or trench forming a boundary around the base of the mound. To casual eyes it might suggest something ancient, a prehistoric burial site perhaps, but the current interpretation is rather more deliberate and more recent: this is most likely a designed landscape feature, an artificial earthwork shaped to give drama or visual interest to the demesne grounds of Killua Castle.

The demesne landscapes of Georgian and Regency Ireland were often treated as open-air theatres, their owners commissioning mounds, cascades, ruins, and eye-catchers to punctuate views and signal cultivated taste. Killua Castle, situated some 400 metres to the north-north-east, was the seat of the Chapman family, and its grounds were laid out with considerable ambition. The 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map marks a nearby structure, 120 metres to the north-north-east, in Gothic script as simply "Monument", suggesting it was already recognised as a folly of some kind. Follies were ornamental buildings or structures, often designed to look ancient or ruinous, built purely for aesthetic effect. What makes the mound itself particularly interesting is what aerial photography has revealed nearby: the cropmarks of five similar earthworks, visible on a Digital Globe image taken in November 2011, running in a line from west to east roughly 70 metres to the south. Cropmarks appear when buried or earthen features affect how vegetation grows above them, leaving faint but readable traces from the air. The presence of a whole sequence of such mounds, aligned and evenly distributed, strongly suggests a deliberate landscape scheme rather than anything accidental or ancient.