Subcircular in shape and roughly four and a half metres across, with a flattened top less than a metre and a half wide, it is modest almost to the point of invisibility. Two stones survive at its edges, one set along the perimeter to the north-east and another positioned perpendicular to the mound at the south, suggesting the feature was once more deliberately defined than it now appears.

Inis Cealtra, sometimes called Holy Island, was one of the more significant ecclesiastical settlements in early medieval Ireland, and St. Caimin's church remains its best-known structure. The mound lies roughly fifteen metres to the north of that church, and its purpose is clarified by an account recorded in the Ordnance Survey Letters, compiled by John O'Flanagan in 1927. That source notes that pilgrims once went around a station monument at the end of St. Caimin's church, placing this unremarkable-looking earthwork within a tradition of penitential practice. A penitential station, in this context, is a designated point on a prescribed devotional route, where pilgrims would stop, pray, and typically walk circuits, often barefoot, as an act of penance or intercession. Such stations were common features of Irish pilgrimage sites and could range from elaborately carved crosses to, as here, a simple mound of earth and stone.