It has been assigned a place in the national inventory of archaeological monuments, which puts it in the company of burial mounds, ring barrows, and earthworks spanning several thousand years of Irish prehistory, yet the specific details that might explain what it actually is remain, for now, unpublished.

Mounds of this kind in the west of Ireland can belong to any number of traditions. Some are natural glacial features that attracted human activity and later interpretation. Others are deliberately constructed, whether as burial monuments from the Bronze Age, as Anglo-Norman mottes (earthen platforms built to carry a timber tower and associated with early medieval lordship), or as the accumulated remains of long-settled farmsteads. The name An Tinbhear is an Irish placename suggesting a confluence of waters, typically the meeting of a river with the sea or with another river, which would place this feature in a low-lying or estuarine setting of the kind that communities have gravitated towards for millennia. Without further documentation it is not possible to say which category this mound belongs to, or what, if anything, lies beneath its surface.