A graveyard that has absorbed burials from the eighteenth century onwards might seem unremarkable in rural Kildare, but the mound beneath this one is something older and stranger. The burial ground near Colbinstown sits atop a glacial hillock, a natural hummock of glacially deposited material rising several metres above the surrounding flat pasture drained by the River Greese. At some point, probably in the early medieval period, that hillock was deliberately shaped and faced with flat slabs of Silurian grit, the local stone, to form what looks very much like a revetted mound. A revetment in this context means a retaining skin of stonework applied to the exterior of an earthen mound to hold its shape and present a formal face. The western summit, roughly oval and measuring around 25 by 19 metres, stands more than four metres above the ground to the south, with a lower terrace to the east retained by facing stones still intermittently visible at the base.

When R. A. S. Macalister and Robert Lloyd Praeger excavated the site in 1929, they found the hillock neatly faced with flattish slabs ranging from about 45 centimetres to 1.2 metres across, best preserved on the northern and eastern sides of the lower section. Most of the revetment stones had long since disappeared, almost certainly repurposed as grave markers or building material for the enclosing wall added around 1830, when trees were also planted on the mound, according to Fitzgerald writing at the turn of the twentieth century. Macalister and Praeger were cautious about interpreting the structure, but raised the possibility that it was intended as an inauguration mound, built around the grave of a person of considerable standing. What elevates the site further is the collection of ogham stones found within the burial ground. Ogham is an early medieval script in which letters are represented by notches and strokes cut along the edge of a stone, typically used to record personal names in early Irish. Macalister catalogued seven such stones here, and Fitzgerald identified several additional pillar stones, cross slabs, and cross bases, making this a remarkably dense concentration of early medieval carved stonework in a single county Kildare field. A possible church site was also identified on the summit of the mound, and Colbinstown Castle lies roughly 580 metres to the north-east.