Roughly eighteen metres across and rising somewhere between one and a half and two metres above the surrounding ground, it is the kind of feature that catches the eye of a careful walker but might otherwise be dismissed as a natural rise in the land. It is not. The slight depression running around its outer edge is the remnant of a fosse, essentially a shallow ditch used in early earthwork construction to define and defend an enclosed space, and beyond that lies the ghost of an outer field bank, now reduced in places to little more than a scarp and a hedgerow.

By the time the Ordnance Survey recorded this part of Monaghan in 1834, the feature was already wooded, appearing on the six-inch map as a subcircular tree-covered enclosure. It looked much the same on the 1907 edition. That consistency across seven decades of mapping suggests the mound had long since passed out of any active use and into the kind of semi-deliberate preservation that comes when a plot of land is simply left alone. The outer bank and hedge, which survive on the north-west to south-east arc but are largely absent on the western and northern sides, once formed a secondary enclosure some thirty-six metres in diameter, framing the central mound within a wider defined space. Earthworks of this general character, a raised platform with enclosing elements, appear across Ireland in contexts ranging from early medieval ringforts to later ceremonial or agricultural structures, though without excavation it is impossible to say which category, if any, applies here.