For years it appeared in official records as a cemetery mound, placed on maps immediately west of the Piper's Stones, a well-known Bronze Age stone circle in the area. Neither the classification nor the location was correct. The mound itself, roughly ten metres across and only about sixty centimetres high, sits within a shallow encircling ditch and almost certainly began its life as a designed landscape feature, the kind of ornamental earthwork that estate owners of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries occasionally commissioned to give their grounds a suitably antiquarian atmosphere. Four more such mounds are said to exist nearby, though they were not examined in detail.

When Helen Roe excavated the mound in 1946, the picture became more layered. Scattered in the vicinity were fragments of pottery spanning several centuries, including pieces dating to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, material from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and later eighteenth and nineteenth century sherds. None of this necessarily means the mound itself is medieval; the pottery may reflect activity on the surrounding land over a long period rather than anything directly connected to the earthwork. But it does suggest the ground here has seen use, or at least habitation of some kind, across a considerable stretch of time. Roe's publication in 1946 provided the corrected location that later revisions to the official record eventually adopted, quietly shifting the site away from the erroneous position it had occupied in the 1986 and 1995 inventories.