It carries the designation of a monument, which means someone at some point judged it old enough and significant enough to warrant official attention, but the details that would tell us what it actually is remain elusive.

Mounds of this kind appear throughout the west of Ireland in considerable variety. Some are burial mounds, raised over the dead during the Bronze Age or earlier, their chambers long since collapsed or robbed. Others are the natural-looking remnants of a rath or ringfort, the earthen enclosure that served as a farmstead across much of early medieval Ireland. Still others turn out to be middens, the accumulated refuse of coastal communities who left behind layers of shell and bone that time has softened into gentle rises in the ground. Without excavation records or detailed fieldwork notes available for this particular site, the mound at Keel sits in that ambiguous category of things that are clearly there, clearly old, and not yet fully explained.