In a field of level pasture near the County Kildare village of Clonard, a grass-covered earthen mound rises seven metres from the surrounding ground, its steep sides giving it a presence that feels out of proportion with its relatively modest footprint. What makes it particularly arresting is the summit: not a dome or a rounded crown, but a narrow, almost platform-like surface, just under three metres wide and twelve metres long, as though something deliberate and specific was once intended for the top. Around the base on the eastern and southern sides runs a low berm, a shelf of earth that girdles the mound at ankle height, hinting at a formal design rather than a natural accumulation.

The first Ordnance Survey mapping of Ireland, carried out in the 1830s and published in 1838, recorded the mound as a substantial circular earthwork roughly fifty metres in diameter, at that time sitting within an orchard and surrounded on three sides by an extensive complex of buildings, none of which survive. The antiquarian William Wilde visited in 1849 and described it as "a very perfect ancient tumulus", a tumulus being a burial mound of prehistoric or early historic origin, typically raised over the remains of the dead. Wilde's confidence in its integrity is notable given how many such earthworks had already been disturbed or quarried by that period. The mound sits approximately 350 metres south of the point where the Glash River meets the River Boyne, a confluence that would have made this low-lying ground both navigable and significant in early settlement terms. Where livestock have worn away the grass on the northwestern and southeastern flanks, the mound's composition becomes visible: gravel and clay, built up and shaped by hand.