The name stuck, even if it was never quite accurate. What stands here is a bowl-barrow, a type of prehistoric funerary monument consisting of a raised central mound ringed by a ditch and an outer bank, and it has nothing to do with medieval water defences. The mound itself is steep-sided and flat-topped, rising roughly 2.3 to 2.45 metres above the surrounding fosse, which is the ditch encircling it, with a base diameter of just over 18 metres north to south and a narrow summit only 3.3 to 3.6 metres across. The whole structure sits on open pastureland with wide views in every direction, the kind of elevated, conspicuous position that prehistoric communities across Ireland tended to choose for monuments of this kind.

The monument has attracted antiquarian attention for well over a century. Writing in 1915, the Clare historian T. J. Westropp recorded two berms, which are narrow flat ledges cut into earthworks, one around the base of the central mound and another on the inner face of the outer bank. When the site was inspected again in 1998, neither berm could be identified, suggesting they had either slumped or become obscured by vegetation. The outer bank itself is overgrown along much of its northern and south-south-western arc. On the western side, some of the central mound has been eroded or dug away at some point, and the exposed section shows the mound is built from earth mixed with a scattering of shale pebbles. A modern field boundary cuts through the eastern part of the monument, crossing the outer bank and slicing through the fosse, the kind of incremental agricultural damage that has altered the edges of countless earthworks across the country. Roughly 126 metres to the east-south-east lies a second monument, a stepped barrow, meaning this corner of Craggycorradan holds a small but notable concentration of prehistoric earthworks, largely unannounced by any roadside sign.