A road shown on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 was cut straight through the eastern portion of the barrow, and today no surface trace remains of either the laneway or the section of the monument it bisected. What is left is a semicircular, slightly raised platform, roughly ten metres across, defined by a fosse, which is essentially a surrounding ditch, about one metre deep and three metres wide, with an external earthen bank rising to around a metre in height. A gap in that bank on the west-north-western side may be original, or may reflect later disturbance; the site is now overgrown with furze and sits in rough pasture.

A ring barrow is a low burial mound, typically from the Bronze Age, enclosed within a circular or near-circular ditch and bank. They are relatively common across Ireland, though the condition of individual examples varies enormously depending on what has been done to the surrounding land over the past few centuries. What makes Mountrivers quietly interesting is the cluster it belongs to. A second ring barrow sits roughly twenty-five metres to the east-south-east, and two further possible examples lie within twenty-five metres to the north-east and east-south-east respectively. Four monuments in such close proximity suggests this small corner of mid Cork was used repeatedly, or over a sustained period, as a place set apart for the dead, though without excavation the sequence and relationship between them remains unclear.