Cartographers mapping the area in 1839 labelled it a "Moat", suggesting a medieval fortification; by 1940, the same feature was being called a "Tumulus", implying something far older, a burial mound of prehistoric origin. Neither label has ever been conclusively confirmed, and the mound sits quietly in that ambiguous space between the two.

The site occupies a scarp directly above the combined Clonough and Inch Rivers, which flow together in a north-south direction, with the stream running immediately to the west. When a field record was made in 1940, the mound was accompanied by a substantial fosse, the term for the ditch that typically surrounds an earthwork, measuring roughly seven to ten metres wide at the top and between one and a half and three and a half metres deep depending on which side you measured. Beyond the fosse lay a berm, a flat shelf of ground about ten metres wide, and then an outer bank running from the south-west round to the north-west. By 1987, that surrounding architecture had largely disappeared from view. What remained was a grass-covered mound approximately thirty-two metres across at the base and up to five metres high on its western side, with some scrub growth but no visible fosse, kerb, or outer bank. The possibility raised at that point was that this is a motte, the raised earthen platform used by Norman settlers from the twelfth century onward as the foundation for a timber tower, which would bring the date of construction back into the medieval period and align it more closely with that original 1839 designation. Whether it was raised by Norman hands or marks something much earlier, the mound has outlasted the certainty of everyone who has tried to name it.