At least 26 metres long and 20 metres wide, it was built up in nine or more stone terraces, their edges defined by low walls, their surfaces paved with Valentia slate and scattered with small and large white quartz pebbles. The use of quartz in sacred or funerary contexts is a recurring feature of early Irish religious and burial sites, where the stone's brightness seems to have carried deliberate symbolic weight. What looks at first like a landscaped earthwork is, in fact, a complex shrine structure of considerable ambition.

Excavations carried out by M. J. O'Kelly in the 1950s first brought the site to wider attention, and it was during that work that the uppermost terrace was removed. Later analysis by Hayden, drawing on a partial excavation conducted in 2004, suggested that this missing top terrace would originally have supported a tent-shaped gable shrine, a type of early Irish reliquary structure designed to house and display the remains of a saint or other venerated individual. On the fifth terrace, O'Kelly had also uncovered a corner-post shrine, a small box-like stone structure used for similar purposes. The two forms of shrine, one architectural and monumental, the other intimate and portable in character, existing within the same layered mound, point to a site of sustained and organised devotion. Burials were found on terraces seven and eight, and a stone-lined charnel pit containing the remains of at least four individuals lay at the north-eastern side of the seventh terrace. A charnel pit is a deposit of collected skeletal remains, often gathered from earlier graves when a site was reorganised or expanded, suggesting this place was used and reworked across a long period of time.