What sits on top is harder to read: possible wall-footings of a building, the faint geometry of something that was once deliberate. The site is formally classified as an earthwork, but the classification comes with a caveat rarely attached to ancient monuments. It is, in the official phrasing, of doubtful antiquity.

The earliest cartographic record, the first-edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of the nineteenth century, shows the hillock not as a ruin or an earthwork but as a grove of trees, which suggests that whatever shaping took place here may have happened within living memory of that survey. The working theory is that the hillock was landscaped during the nineteenth century, possibly as a garden feature or an ornamental folly, rather than thrown up in some earlier age as a fortification or burial mound. The bogland surrounding it would have made the dry, elevated ground feel more significant than it might elsewhere, and the scarping of the sides gives it a tidied, almost composed quality that sits uneasily with genuine prehistoric earthworks. In 2002, archaeological monitoring carried out by Richard Crumlish during a development to the south of the hillock turned up three burnt spreads and two charcoal spreads in the ground, traces of fire and burning that may point to earlier, if modest, human activity in the wider area, even if the mound itself remains ambiguous.