The damage is old and deliberate: at some point, people dug into it looking for treasure. What they left behind is a mound that is now difficult to read precisely, its edges blurring into the surrounding hillside in a way that has frustrated more than one surveyor trying to pin down its exact dimensions.

The cairn, known as Doonainy Cairn or Dunainy on the Ordnance Survey map, appears on the 1840 edition of the OS six-inch map, where a trigonometric station was marked at a spot height of 537 feet. When the antiquarian T.J. Westropp recorded it, he estimated the diameter at somewhere between 14.6 and 16.7 metres and the height at around 3.3 metres. Writing in 1944, M.J. O'Kelly measured the mound at approximately 21 metres north to south and 13 metres east to west, with a height closer to 2.1 metres, and noted that it appeared to have been built of both earth and stones. Westropp had also noticed a faintly marked enclosure and a circular hollow near the cairn, though O'Kelly was sceptical of their significance, reading the enclosure as part of an ancient field system and the hollow as a natural feature of the hill. Westropp proposed that the cairn might be associated with Áine, a figure from Irish mythology closely connected to this hill, but O'Kelly found little evidence to support that identification. By 2004, when Condit and Coyne recorded the site, the cairn measured roughly 12 metres east to west and 20 metres north to south, with a maximum height of 2.5 metres; they also noted the possibility of a second, smaller cairn nearby, though this may simply be the result of localised quarrying activity. Remnants of low field walls are visible in the surrounding area.

The cairn sits on the eastern summit of the hill, and the approach will involve some uphill walking across open ground. The disturbed north-eastern section is apparent once you are close, and it is worth taking time to look at the edges of the mound, where the boundary between built structure and natural slope becomes genuinely uncertain. The remnants of field walls in the vicinity give a sense of how this landscape was once organised, even if the cairn's own origins remain unresolved.