Crossbeg Lough, roughly seventy metres to the south-east, no longer exists as open water; it has been drained and turned to pasture like so much of the Irish midland and western landscape. But the mound remains, grass-covered and flat-topped, its slumping sides suggesting something that has been quietly settling into the ground for a very long time.

The mound is modest in scale, between twelve and a half and fourteen metres in diameter and only about sixty centimetres high, largely earthen but with some stones incorporated into its fabric. What gives it a particular atmosphere is what grows from its centre: two hawthorn trees, their roots disturbing a loose heap of stone roughly two metres across. The hawthorn has long been associated in Irish folk tradition with boundaries between worlds, with fairy forts, and with sites that people were reluctant to disturb or clear. Whether or not that tradition accounts for the trees' survival here, their presence on top of a low earthen platform at the silted-up margins of a vanished lough gives the place an oddly composed quality, as though the landscape arranged itself around this small rise and then simply waited. The mound's original purpose is unrecorded; it could be a platform of any number of types known from the Irish archaeological landscape, from a small ringfort remnant to something associated with land management or even funerary use, but nothing in the surviving evidence pins it down.