The mound, known in Irish as Knockane-na-m-buachaillidhe, translates roughly as "the hillock of the boys", a name that raises more questions than it answers. Whether the name refers to young men who gathered there, to some folk memory of burial, or to something else entirely is not recorded. What is clear is that the mound was already carrying that name and a reputation for concealed riches when it was first seriously noted in the nineteenth century.

The antiquarian R. R. Brash visited and described the site in 1852, recording it as approximately fifteen feet high and sixty feet in diameter, with a conspicuous excavation cut into its western side by people searching for gold. At that time it stood alongside a second tumulus in the vicinity. A tumulus is simply a burial mound, typically prehistoric, raised over the remains of the dead, and the presence of two in close proximity is not unusual in this part of Ireland. The site appeared on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a circular mound roughly ten metres across, with a trigonometrical station, one of the fixed survey points used to triangulate accurate maps across the country, placed at its centre. Curiously, it vanished from the 1906 edition of the same map entirely, before reappearing in 1937, this time with the trigonometrical station marked again and a hachured rise shown to the north of it. The mound as it stands today tapers to a flat top just under three metres across, with a base diameter of over fourteen metres, and that depression in the centre, whether from the gold-seekers or from later disturbance, remains visible.