It measures roughly twenty metres across and barely a metre in height, ringed by a kerb of upright stones, or orthostats, set edge to edge. Nothing about its physical scale announces the claim attached to it: local tradition holds that this is the burial place of Fionn Mac Cumhaill, the legendary hero of Irish mythology and leader of the Fianna.

The tradition was recorded in the Irish Folklore Commission Schools' Manuscripts, a vast collection gathered in the late 1930s when schoolchildren across Ireland were asked to document local lore from older community members. That this particular hill in Monaghan should be identified as Fionn's grave is not entirely surprising. Sites associated with Fionn Mac Cumhaill appear across Ireland and Scotland, attached to prominent hills, unusual rock formations, and ancient monuments where local memory needed an explanation grander than everyday archaeology could supply. The monument itself is a kerbed cairn, a prehistoric burial form in which a mound of stones is retained by a ring of larger upright or edge-set slabs. The kerbstones here survive largely intact along the northern side of a field bank running roughly east-northeast to west-southwest, though five stones have been displaced and now lie on the southern side.

The cairn sits directly on the ridge top, which means it would have been a conspicuous landmark when built, visible across the surrounding drumlin landscape. Drumlins are the smooth, elongated hills formed by glacial deposits that give this part of Ulster its rolling, closely packed character. Placing a monument at the highest point of such a ridge was a deliberate choice, and that decision, made in prehistory, may well be part of why the spot accumulated legend long after anyone could remember what it actually commemorated.