The local name, Cruckhanacurragh, translates roughly as the little hill of the marsh, which tells you something about both the terrain and the long memory of the people who named it, but rather less about what the mound actually is or who built it.

George Petrie recorded it in 1837, describing a tumulus of stones and clay running to about 180 feet in circumference and standing 15 feet high. Later survey work by Timoney in 1984 measured it more precisely at around 15 metres in diameter and 4.5 metres in height, classifying it as a bowl barrow, a type of burial monument typically formed by a round earthen mound sometimes surrounded by a ditch, associated broadly with the Bronze Age. Seán Ó Nualláin, however, writing in his 1989 survey of the megalithic tombs of County Sligo, floated the alternative possibility that it could be a passage tomb, a far older form of monument in which a stone-lined corridor leads to a burial chamber at the centre of the mound. The two categories are not trivially different; they belong to different millennia and different traditions of the dead. That the mound still sits somewhere between them is part of what makes it interesting. Without excavation, the question is unlikely to be settled, and the hollowed summit noted by Petrie adds a further layer of ambiguity, hinting at disturbance or perhaps at a structural feature long since collapsed.