The juxtaposition is easy to miss if you are focused on the view, which opens in all directions across the surrounding mountains.

The cairn itself is a substantial structure: roughly circular, flat-topped, standing about 1.5 metres high, with a base diameter of around 14 metres. A low fosse, the shallow ditch that typically encircles the base of such a monument to demarcate its boundary, runs around the cairn's edge and is most clearly visible on the eastern and southern sides. Cairns of this type were raised during the Bronze Age, usually as burial monuments, and their hilltop positions were rarely accidental; height carried significance, both practical and ceremonial. At the northeast sector of the summit there is a large cavity, roughly 2 metres square, whose origin is uncertain. It may be the result of relatively recent disturbance, or it could be the remnant of a partially destroyed cist, the small stone-lined box typically used to contain human remains within such a cairn. The heather and bog that have crept across much of the surface make it difficult to read the monument clearly, though the overall form remains legible.

The trig station on top, a concrete pillar used by Ordnance Survey teams to establish precise ground positions during mapping work, was constructed directly onto the cairn. Such stations were routinely placed on summits with clear sightlines, and a Bronze Age cairn on a high hill offered exactly the kind of elevated, unobstructed position that surveyors required. The practical logic of the location has, in other words, held across millennia.