The cairn, a mounded heap of loose stone rather than a formal monument, measures roughly nine metres across and rises to about two and a half metres at its western side. Its stones are irregular in shape and vary considerably in size, giving it the appearance of something accumulated rather than carefully constructed. A short stretch of drystone retaining wall survives at the south-west, and a sheepfold has been built into the eastern side, the practical needs of a later era folded neatly into something far older.

What makes this particular cairn more than a feature of the upland landscape is a suggestion made by a scholar named Delap in 1913. He proposed that the site corresponds to the 'Cahircanaway' recorded as the location where Florence MacCarthy was inaugurated as MacCarthy More in 1600. The MacCarthy More title was the senior lordship of the MacCarthy dynasty, one of the great Gaelic families of Munster, and inauguration ceremonies of this kind were deeply traditional affairs conducted at specific ceremonial places, often elevated sites with symbolic or ancestral associations. Florence MacCarthy was a complicated figure in late Elizabethan Ireland, a Gaelic lord who navigated, not always successfully, the turbulent politics of the Nine Years War period. If Delap's identification is correct, this wind-exposed hilltop on the Iveragh Peninsula was the stage for one of the last such inaugurations of a major Gaelic lordship, held at the very moment that world was coming apart. The cairn sits roughly 230 metres west-north-west of a second monument at Gleensk, one that includes both a cairn and an ogham stone, suggesting this part of Drung Hill carried some accumulated ceremonial or commemorative significance across many centuries.