What you see today is a reconstruction, put back together after archaeologists took it apart. The mound is a bowl-barrow, a type of Bronze Age funerary monument consisting of a rounded earthen mound set within a surrounding ditch, known as a fosse, and in this case also an outer earthen bank. Bowl-barrows were typically raised over the cremated or inhumed remains of the dead, and this one proved no exception.

When Hugh Hencken excavated the site in 1935, publishing his findings the same year, he found the mound to be roughly 8.5 metres across and originally standing about 1.4 metres high. The fosse encircling it was half a metre deep, though it had been levelled on the eastern to south-eastern side. The outer bank survived from the south-south-east around to the north-north-east, with a gap of about a metre on the north-western arc, possibly an original entrance or causeway. The excavation confirmed the presence of burials within. At some point, the erection of a stone fence on the eastern side likely disturbed part of the monument, a reminder of how many such sites have been quietly compromised by later agricultural activity without anyone quite noticing at the time.