It is a ring barrow, a type of prehistoric funerary monument consisting of a roughly circular area defined by a surrounding ditch, known as a fosse, and an outer earthen bank. This one is small, eight metres in diameter, with a fosse barely ten centimetres deep and a bank rising only twenty centimetres above the ground. Monuments of this kind are generally associated with Bronze Age burial practice, though the precise date of any individual example is difficult to establish without excavation. What makes this particular one quietly unsettling is what local memory attached to it.

As recorded by Hartnett in 1939, the site was used as a children's burial ground within living memory at that time. This places it in a tradition that was once widespread across Ireland: the use of ancient, unconsecrated, or liminal ground for the burial of unbaptised infants, known in Irish as cilliní. Such burials were excluded from consecrated churchyards under Catholic practice, and families turned instead to old raths, the edges of bogs, or, as here, prehistoric earthworks whose original purpose had long been forgotten. The ring barrow at Derryroe thus accumulated meaning across separate eras, first as a monument to the prehistoric dead, and later as a quiet, unofficial repository for children who could not be buried in the parish ground. Roughly twenty metres to the east-north-east lie what may be standing stones, suggesting this corner of mid Cork was already a place of some significance long before any written record.

The earthwork sits in agricultural pasture, and its low profile means it requires a careful eye to distinguish from ordinary unevenness in the ground. The external bank and fosse are shallow enough that livestock and time have softened them considerably, but the circular form remains legible.