It barely registers as a feature at all, standing just twenty to thirty centimetres above the surrounding ground and measuring six and a half metres across. What gives it away, where the grass cover has been worn thin, are concentrations of angular stone chips in dark-grey soil: the characteristic signature of a burnt mound. These sites, found widely across Ireland and Britain, are prehistoric accumulations of fire-cracked stone, the debris left by repeated cycles of heating rocks and plunging them into water, most likely for cooking or bathing. Their ordinariness is part of what makes them quietly remarkable; they are, in essence, the discarded waste heaps of everyday ancient life.

This particular mound came to light in February 2015, when ground works being carried out in advance of a forestry plantation disturbed the surface and exposed the burnt stone beneath. The discovery was communicated by Michael Cox on the 23rd of that month. Historical Ordnance Survey maps from 1838 and 1917 show that the shoreline of Cloonacurry Lough once lay considerably closer to the mound than it does today; modern drainage practices have caused the lake to shrink, leaving the site stranded some seventy metres south of the current waterline. In prehistory, then, this would have been a lakeshore location, which fits the known pattern of burnt mound activity: a ready water source was essential to the whole process. Sixteen metres to the west lies a possible megalithic tomb, a type of communal stone-built burial monument associated broadly with Neolithic and early Bronze Age communities, suggesting that this corner of the Mayo landscape was used and marked repeatedly over a long span of time. An exclusion zone has since been established to protect the mound from further disturbance.