The surrounding ground, when viewed from above, resolves into an irregular oval of stony material, and the overall arrangement, a mound enclosed by a bank, raises the possibility that this is a barrow, a type of prehistoric burial mound constructed to mark or contain the dead. That question has not yet been definitively answered, which is part of what makes the site worth attention.

The structure at Tomdeely North first entered the formal record in 1999, when archaeologist Celie O'Rahilly was surveying the route of a proposed ESB power line and logged it as Site 3 in her findings. At that point it was classified as a megalithic structure, meaning a monument built using large stones, though the precise nature of the site remained open. The oblong shape, roughly eight metres on its north-east to south-west axis and four and a half metres across, had already been captured on the 1924 edition of the Ordnance Survey twenty-five-inch map, so the feature was not newly discovered so much as newly scrutinised. Later aerial imagery, including Digital Globe orthophotos from 2011 to 2013 and a Google Earth image from April 2015, confirmed the stony oval on the ground surface and added some visual clarity to what the OS map had recorded nearly a century earlier. The site sits in low-lying, gently undulating farmland, with the River Deel approximately nine hundred metres to the east and the Shannon Estuary visible to the north.

The monument lies about thirty metres south of a public road, with a gallops track running roughly eighty-five metres to the south, so the wider area sees some quiet activity. The flat-topped rock and its associated hawthorn are the most immediately visible features at ground level; hawthorns frequently mark ancient or sacred sites in the Irish landscape, and their presence beside prehistoric monuments is common enough to be worth noting. There is no formal access or signage, and the site sits within agricultural land, so any visit would require care and consideration for the surrounding farmland. The aerial images remain the clearest way to read the oval outline of the monument, but the setting itself, open pasture with long views toward the estuary, gives some sense of why a place like this might have mattered to the people who built here.