Fourteen metres across and rising to about three metres in height, it is not especially large by the standards of Irish prehistoric monuments, yet it has a quiet stubbornness to it. The knoll itself provides natural drama, with steep slopes falling away to the north and east, giving the mound an elevated presence in the surrounding landscape that its modest dimensions alone would not quite justify.

When the site was investigated in 1933 and reported by Price the following year, the internal structure turned out to be more considered than the grassy exterior suggests. Beneath the surface, excavators found distinct layers of earth and sand, with an irregular circle of boulders enclosing a core of mixed stones and blackened earth. That blackened material hints at burning of some kind, a feature sometimes associated with funerary activity in prehistoric mounds, though the investigation yielded no finds whatsoever. No pottery, no bone, no metalwork. The absence of finds makes confident dating impossible, and the mound remains one of those archaeological features that archaeology can describe in some detail without being able to fully explain. Whether it was a burial monument, a marker of territory, or something else entirely, Stranakelly offers no straightforward answers.