This is a mound barrow, a type of prehistoric burial monument in which the dead were interred beneath a raised earthen mound, often surrounded by a ditch that defined and enclosed the sacred space. The one at Dunnaman in County Limerick has been sitting on its gently sloping ground, facing roughly north-northwest, for longer than any written record can say.

The site first appears in cartographic form on the 1840 edition of the Ordnance Survey Ireland six-inch map, where it is marked as a circular enclosure. By the 1897 edition of the twenty-five-inch map, surveyors were recording it as a raised area with a sloping bank measuring around twenty-five metres in external diameter. When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland inspected it in 2000, they found an oval-shaped interior, roughly fourteen metres across on its longer axis and ten metres on its shorter one, defined by a scarped earthen edge, meaning the ground had been deliberately cut and shaped to create a clean boundary. An external fosse, or ditch, ran around the outside, about four metres wide and just over a metre deep internally, though by 2000 it was only clearly visible on the northern and western sides. The interior was dry and free of scrub. A ringfort, a different class of monument and likely of early medieval date, sits about four hundred and fifty metres to the south-southeast, and the townland boundary with Castleroberts runs along the nearby river, placing this barrow at an old edge of things in more than one sense.

The monument sits around a hundred and ten metres southwest of the River Maigue, in ordinary-looking pasture with reasonable views in most directions. There is no visitor infrastructure, and the land is agricultural, so anyone curious to see it should bear that in mind. The trees visible along the monument's edge on aerial imagery from 2018 and 2020 serve as the most useful landmark from a distance. The fosse is subtle enough that it rewards careful attention rather than a quick glance; walking the northern arc of the perimeter is where the earthwork reads most clearly.