The mound is irregularly shaped, roughly 25 metres north to south and nearly 20 metres east to west, rising to about a metre in height. Some of its stones appear to have been deliberately set upright, but they form no recognisable pattern, which rules out the tidier explanations and leaves the structure sitting in a category archaeologists are rarely comfortable with: artificial, intentional, and of uncertain origin.

The valley itself runs north-east from Dunquin on the tip of the Dingle Peninsula, tucked between Croaghmarhin to the north and Coumaleague Hill to the south. Its upper reaches are now buried under blanket bog, grazed only by sheep, but the bog has been slowly swallowing a much older landscape. A wedge-tomb, a type of megalithic burial monument associated with the Early Bronze Age, lies largely submerged in the bog on the southern slopes of the valley, and turf-cutting nearby has exposed a pre-bog hut foundation. On the northern side of the river that runs along the valley floor, further Early Bronze Age traces survive: a standing stone, a megalithic structure, a possible cist (a small stone-lined grave), and two enclosures. Disused field boundaries, some surviving as upright stones and others as low turf-covered banks, thread across the moorland around the modern enclosed fields, which themselves overlay an earlier field system that may pre-date the onset of peat growth in the area. The artificial mound sits about 175 metres south-west of the wedge-tomb, part of this same dense cluster of features whose relationships to one another cannot be resolved from the surface alone. Whether the mound is Bronze Age, later, or something else entirely, the valley's archaeology was first systematically described by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, and the question of the mound's origin remains open.