From this elevation, wide views open out across Clew Bay to the north-east, east, and south, though the hill itself closes off the prospect in every other direction. The monument is not a house, not a fort in any conventional sense, and not quite a straightforward cairn. What it actually was remains an open question, and that ambiguity is part of what makes it worth pausing over.

The structure measures approximately 15.3 metres by 15.7 metres externally and is built around a central hollow some 7 to 8 metres across, its edges dropping as much as 1.2 metres below the surrounding mass of stones. That outer band of cairn-like material, between 3 and 4 metres wide, is held in place by an external revetment, a facing of large blocks and boulders intended to keep the cairn body from spreading. One slim slab on the northern side, measuring 1.5 metres long and 0.7 metres high, is almost megalithic in scale, quite different in character from the more modest stones around it. On the eastern side, the revetment is absent for a stretch of about 3 metres, and a cluster of transversely set slabs there may point to a former entrance or deliberate gap. Archaeologists working from the New Survey of Clare Island, published by the Royal Irish Academy in 2007, suggest the monument could be a ring-cairn or barrow, the latter being a type of burial mound found across prehistoric Ireland and Britain, though the arrangement of slabs raises the possibility it was instead a penannular monument, one with a deliberate opening rather than a fully enclosed ring. Centuries of agricultural activity have layered over the original form: old tillage ridges run across the central hollow, later drystone field walls cross the monument's northern and southern edges, and at least one sheep pen appears to have been cut directly into the south-western side, removing a section of revetment entirely.