It measures roughly eight metres across and barely half a metre in height, dimensions that suggest something once more deliberate than what survives today.

What makes this modest earthwork worth a second look is a suggestion raised by the archaeologist Michael Herity in 1974, who proposed that it may originally have been a passage tomb. Passage tombs are among the oldest monument types in Ireland, megalithic structures typically dating to the Neolithic period, in which a stone-lined corridor leads to a burial chamber beneath a covering mound of earth or cairn material. The most celebrated examples, Newgrange and Knowth in the Boyne Valley, are on a vastly different scale, but smaller, satellite examples are found across the country, often in elevated positions that suggest the choice of site was as deliberate as the construction itself. A hilltop location like Golden Hill would be consistent with that tradition. Whether the mound ever contained a stone passage or chamber is not recorded, and its current poor condition means the original form is largely lost.