It is roughly oval in plan, measuring about five metres north to south and four and a half metres east to west, and rises somewhere between seventy centimetres and a metre and a third at its highest point. Blackthorn trees have seeded themselves among the stones over the years, and grass has crept across the base, giving the whole thing the appearance of something ancient settling gradually into the landscape. Whether it was ever used as a penitential station in the strict sense, a place where pilgrims completed rounds or prayers as acts of devotion, is not entirely clear.

The mound sits beside a holy well, and in Irish devotional tradition the two features often went together. Pilgrims visiting holy wells frequently brought stones as token offerings, and over generations those offerings could accumulate into a substantial cairn. That is one explanation put forward by Francis Brew in his 1998 local history of the Parish of Kilkeedy, which covers the area around Tubber in east Clare. Brew also raised the alternative possibility that the mound is a burial cairn, a form of monument with a much older ancestry than Christian pilgrimage. The two explanations are not necessarily incompatible; sacred sites in Ireland were often layered across time, with earlier monuments absorbed into later patterns of devotion. The karstic pavement surrounding the site, a surface of bare or thinly soiled limestone characteristic of the Burren region, adds to the sense that this is a landscape where the ground itself has shaped how people have moved through and used it for a very long time.