What sets it apart, to an attentive eye, is its form: a ring barrow, one of the quieter categories of prehistoric burial monument found across Ireland, consisting of a central earthen mound ringed by a shallow ditch and an outer bank. This one measures roughly 6.4 metres north to south and 5.7 metres east to west, with a surrounding fosse, that is, a ditch, descending to about 0.45 metres in depth, and an external bank rising to half a metre. The whole thing amounts to an unassuming bump in a field, yet it represents a deliberate act of landscape-making from the Bronze Age or earlier.

Ring barrows are funerary monuments, typically raised over a burial, sometimes containing cremated remains, sometimes grave goods, and sometimes very little that has survived the millennia. They were constructed to mark and contain the dead, but also, arguably, to claim and shape territory for the living, asserting a community's relationship to a particular piece of ground. This example at Kilquire, in the district around Ballinrobe and the lakes of Mask and Carra, was recorded as part of a local archaeological survey published in 1994, compiled by D. Lavelle for the Lough Mask and Lough Carra Tourist Development Association. That survey drew attention to a landscape that, between its lakeshores and quiet farmland, holds rather more archaeological texture than its appearance might suggest.