The cairn is roughly circular, about ten metres across and just over a metre high, modest enough that a casual walker might dismiss it as a natural rise in the ground. What lifts it out of the ordinary is a partly stone-lined hollow on its northern side, which may represent a cist, a type of small stone-built burial chamber typically formed from upright slabs and a capstone, used to contain human remains.

The mound sits within a semi-karst environment, meaning the underlying limestone has been partially dissolved and eroded into the kind of irregular, fissured terrain characteristic of parts of the Burren region. This is rough pastureland at elevation, and the cairn is embedded within a much larger multiperiod field system, a patchwork of enclosures and boundaries laid down and reworked by farming communities across centuries or millennia. Burial cairns of this type are generally associated with the Neolithic or Bronze Age, placed deliberately in prominent or elevated positions, often in sight of other monuments or within landscapes that already carried meaning for the communities who used them. Whether the hollow on the northern side is indeed a cist, or the result of later disturbance, has not been definitively established.