What you are looking at is a barrow, a prehistoric burial monument, and its dimensions are specific enough to suggest it was deliberately engineered rather than simply accumulated over time: a diameter of around 46 metres, with a surrounding fosse, that is, a ditch cut into the ground, measuring roughly 2.8 metres wide and just under a metre deep. Beyond the fosse, a flat-topped bank survives along the north-western and western edges, tapering from 4 metres at its base to 1.2 metres at the top and rising about 0.6 metres above the surrounding ground. The eastern and south-eastern portions of the enclosure are less structurally defined, marked out now mainly by bushes rather than earthworks.

The site's recorded history, at least in cartographic terms, stretches back to 1837, when the Ordnance Survey produced its first detailed 6-inch maps of Ireland. At that point, the area appears to have already been wooded, indicated on the map as a copse. Whether the trees were planted deliberately to obscure or protect the monument, or simply grew up around it over time, is not recorded. The site's details were compiled and published by archaeologist Geraldine Stout in 1998, whose work on the passage tomb and barrow traditions of the region brought a number of such earthworks to wider attention. The interior of the barrow is still planted with trees today, which both preserves and complicates any reading of the ground surface beneath.

Access to the site involves navigating the northern slope of Athgoe Hill, which sits in south County Dublin, not far from the village of Athgoe itself. The wooded interior means that the monument is most legible from outside its boundary, where the fosse and the remnant bank to the north-west are the clearest indicators of what you are looking at. The flat-topped nature of the surviving bank is worth noting when you find it; that particular profile is characteristic of deliberate construction rather than natural accumulation. Visiting in late autumn or winter, when leaf cover is reduced, makes it considerably easier to trace the earthwork's circuit and appreciate the scale of what was once dug and heaped here.