It measures roughly eight metres by seven metres and rises to about two metres in height, modest enough to pass without a second glance. A handful of granite boulders and large stones protrude from its sides, but the top is featureless: no fosse, no kerb, none of the surface signs one might expect from a burial monument, such as the outline of a chamber or a cist, the kind of stone-lined box grave that sometimes survives beneath prehistoric mounds.

What complicates any easy reading of this mound is a detail from the Ordnance Survey's first edition six-inch map, surveyed in 1839. On that sheet, the feature is marked not as a rath or a cairn but with the symbol for a lime-kiln. Lime-kilns were once a fixture of the Irish agricultural landscape, used to burn limestone and produce quicklime for spreading on acidic soils or for use in mortar. They typically leave a roughly circular or oval earthwork, sometimes with a draw-hole at the base, and they can be difficult to distinguish from older earthen monuments once they have been abandoned and overgrown for long enough. The 1839 cartographers evidently had local knowledge, or at least a working theory, that this was industrial rather than prehistoric in origin. Whether that interpretation is correct, or whether the surveyors themselves were uncertain about something already old and ambiguous by their time, cannot now be determined with confidence.