The mound at Killoskehan, however, turns out to be something rather more mundane and, in its own way, more interesting: a glacial hillock, shaped not by human intention but by the slow mechanics of retreating ice, and later cut into by quarrying that stripped away its eastern and southern faces.

What makes the site quietly instructive is precisely what is absent. When the quarrying opened up the hillock's interior, it revealed no habitation layers, none of the compacted earth, ash, bone, or artefact deposits that would betray a long history of human use or deliberate construction. In other words, the mound that might have looked like a monument proved to be geology, not archaeology. Glacial hillocks of this kind, sometimes called drumlins or kames depending on their formation, were scattered across Ireland by the last ice age and have occasionally been mistaken for man-made features, or indeed adapted by later communities who valued the natural elevation. At Killoskehan, the quarrying that disfigured the mound also answered the question of its origins, even if it did so inadvertently.