A low earthen mound, roughly eight metres across and only about forty centimetres high, carries on its surface a small circular arrangement of flat slabs set on edge, forming a partial ring just three and a half metres in diameter. A kerb circle of this kind is thought to be a prehistoric funerary or ritual structure, the kerb stones originally defining the edge of a burial mound. At the western side, just outside this ring, a single upright stone stands just over a metre tall, diamond-shaped when viewed from above and orientated east to west. Packing stones are still visible at its base, holding it in place much as they did when it was first erected. The eastern half of the mound has been disturbed and large stones dumped on it at some point, and part of the kerb arc is missing, but enough survives to give a clear impression of the original design.

What makes the site linger in the mind is not the archaeology alone but a local tradition attached to it. According to oral tradition, Hugh O'Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, camped here on his march south to the Battle of Kinsale in 1601. That battle, in which O'Neill and his allies were decisively defeated by English crown forces, is one of the most consequential events in early modern Irish history; it effectively ended the old Gaelic order and opened the way for the Plantation of Ulster. Whether O'Neill's route actually brought him through this corner of Cork is impossible to verify, but the tradition places a prehistoric monument within a very specific and charged moment in history, layering meaning onto a structure that was already ancient when the Earl would have passed.