It has a name on a map and a classification in a national database, and beyond that, very little is known about it from available sources.

Mounds of this kind in the west of Ireland can represent a wide range of origins. Some are natural glacial features that attracted ritual or funerary use in prehistory. Others are burial mounds, raised deliberately over the dead during the Neolithic or Bronze Age. Still others began as ringfort mounds, the earthen platforms of early medieval settlement, or as mottes, the steep artificial hills thrown up by Norman lords in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to carry a timber tower. Without excavation records or detailed field survey notes in circulation, placing Ballymartin's mound within any of these categories is not possible from what is currently accessible. It remains, for now, a feature of the Mayo terrain that archaeology has noticed but not yet fully described.