The grass-grown mound, roughly a metre high and over twenty-three metres across, is the kind of structure that can pass for a natural feature until you walk its edge and feel the uneven, stony ground underfoot. What gives it away is the ring of standing stones, a kerb of thirty survivors arranged in a rough circle fourteen to fifteen metres in diameter, with traces of a second, inner ring just inside it. At the mound's western interior, the partial remains of a megalithic chamber, a rectangular arrangement of large upright stones, or orthostats, that once formed a roofed burial space, lie partly displaced, partly intact. Two stones at the south of the chamber sit just far enough apart to have been either a side wall or an entrance; nobody has been able to say with certainty which.

The monument was described in detail by Ó Nualláin and Cody in 1987, who noted the careful construction of the kerb, including an unusual doubling at the south-west where a single stone was placed outside and overlapping two others. There is also a small sunken oval ring, roughly twelve centimetres across and a centimetre deep, on the south face of one of the kerbstones near the north-west; whether it was carved deliberately or is simply a natural feature of the stone remains unresolved. The only earlier published reference comes from Carrigan in 1905, who noted that the ruined chamber had all the appearance of what local people called a giant's grave, a common folk description for megalithic tombs across Ireland. Carrigan, drawing on local tradition, went further and suggested that the entire mound had at some point been regarded as a churchyard, which is presumably how the name Old Burying Ground attached itself to a structure that predates Christianity by several thousand years. It is a small linguistic layering that is not unusual in Ireland, where prehistoric monuments were often absorbed into later sacred or communal landscapes, their original purpose forgotten but their presence still felt as somehow significant.