Writing between 1905 and 1925, local historian J. Grove White described what he saw on the summit of Carron Mountain as a circular fortification, roughly 85 yards in diameter, with walls of loose stone nine feet thick and seven feet high, noting that about eight spots inside showed signs of having been dug up. What he was almost certainly describing, without realising it, was a Bronze Age cairn in an advanced state of robbing, its original mounded profile by then so disrupted that it read to the eye as a defensive enclosure rather than a burial monument.

The cairn as it survives today is a circular mound of stone 32 metres in diameter and 2.3 metres high, partially grassed over and colonised by heather. The centre and southern side have been significantly disturbed, with much of the original stone material removed, presumably quarried or cleared over the centuries for other uses. Three small modern mounds sit inside the northern perimeter, suggesting more recent interference of an informal kind. A companion cairn sits approximately 235 metres to the east-northeast on the neighbouring summit of Little Carron. Researcher Meagher, writing in 1988, recorded that the old name for Carron was Cairn Fearadaigh, and that local tradition held the mound to be the burial place of a chieftain of that name. The name itself, meaning something close to the cairn of Fearadach, suggests the monument retained an association with a specific individual long after whatever funerary deposit it contained had been disturbed or forgotten. Five further mounds are recorded on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps along the county boundary stretching east and west, hinting that this hilltop landscape was once more densely marked with such monuments than the current ground-level evidence alone might suggest.