The earthwork measures roughly fifteen metres across on its north-south axis, and its defining feature is a scarp, a slight step or edge in the ground, rising to just twenty centimetres at its highest point. That a modern boundary line bisects it to the north suggests the mound had already lost whatever authority it once carried long before the fields around it were divided up and fenced.

What the earthwork originally was remains uncertain. Circular or near-circular earthworks of this kind appear across Ireland in a range of forms and periods, from prehistoric burial mounds to the enclosures of early medieval ringforts, which were typically the farmsteads of farming families in the centuries around the first millennium. At Gortreagh, the poor state of preservation makes a confident identification difficult. The mound occupies a low natural rise rather than any commanding elevation, which is consistent with a functional agricultural origin rather than a ceremonial or defensive one, though the distinction between those purposes was not always clear-cut in early Irish settlement. The site was documented in the Archaeological Inventory of County Tipperary, compiled by Jean Farrelly and Caimin O'Brien and published in 2002, which records it in its current degraded condition.