It looks, at first glance, like a place that has been emptied of something, which is not entirely wrong. The hollow is the result of decades of gravel quarrying that ate through the interior of the hillock from the west, leaving a flat central area measuring roughly 160 metres east to west by 120 metres north to south. What the quarry workers did not remove, however, were two urn burials, which came to light in 1981 when they were exposed in a section cut into the east side of the mound. Urn burials of this kind, in which cremated remains are placed inside a ceramic vessel and interred, are typically associated with the Bronze Age in Ireland, and their presence here suggests the hillock had human significance long before anyone thought to mine it for gravel.

The mound has attracted confused attention for a long time. In 1838, the scholar and topographer John O'Donovan visited and noted it as a remarkable, round, and reasonably tall hillock, adding pointedly that local people called it a moate but that it showed no sign or vestige of one. A motte, in the medieval sense, is a raised earthwork constructed as the base for a timber or stone fortification, usually introduced to Ireland following the Norman arrival in the twelfth century. O'Donovan was recording something important: the name had attached itself to a natural landform, not a built one. By the time the Ordnance Survey revised its 25-inch map in 1907, the gravel pit had already opened in the western section and the profile of the mound had been significantly altered. The site is still known locally as Sutton's Moat. A piece of folklore collected from pupils at Calary National School captures the older layer of meaning: one child recorded that the moate in front of their home was believed to be a fairy moate, placing it within the widespread tradition of associating prominent natural mounds with otherworldly inhabitants and the kind of respectful unease that, historically, kept people from digging into them. The quarrying suggests that unease eventually faded.