It measures roughly five and a half metres across and stands just under a metre high, modest enough dimensions that a person could easily walk past it without registering what they were looking at. A cairn, in the Irish archaeological sense, is typically a deliberate pile of stones raised over a burial or as a landscape marker, and this one at Knockraheen is not standing alone.

It is the most southerly of three cairns in the immediate area, and together they form part of a wider complex of monuments in this corner of mid Cork. That grouping suggests the landscape here was, at some point, a place of some significance, with multiple structures arranged in relation to one another rather than scattered at random. The Boggeragh Mountains, a range of rounded uplands running through the middle of County Cork, contain a number of prehistoric remains, and the foothills around Knockraheen appear to have been no exception. The surrounding land has since been reclaimed as meadow, which means the agricultural history of the area has quietly reshaped the context in which these older features now sit.

The cairn itself is currently covered in scrub, which both obscures it and, in a practical sense, protects it from casual disturbance. Its companions and the other associated monuments nearby make Knockraheen the kind of place where the interest lies not in any single dramatic feature but in the accumulated evidence of repeated, purposeful human presence across the same stretch of ground.