5 metres from a slight coastal rise in Portmarnock is now surrounded by a residential estate, a children's play area, and information signage. It is the kind of thing that could easily be mistaken for a landscaping feature, a decorative earthwork put in place by a developer with a flair for the theatrical. In fact it is a protected monument, its origins still not entirely resolved, and its survival is partly a matter of luck. A local landowner recalled that in the early 1970s an attempt was made to level it entirely during field clearance works, and the damage done then was still evident when archaeologists opened test trenches into its eastern side decades later.

The mound measures roughly 27 metres north to south and 14 metres east to west, and it sits on ground with wide views out towards the coast. Its popular identification is with a far older story: the scholar Morris, writing in 1939, connected it with the burial place of Maine, son of Medb and Ailill, as named in the Metrical Dindshenchas, a medieval Irish text that records the legendary origins of place names. That association gives the site a certain mythological weight, but the archaeology has complicated the picture. When excavations were carried out in 2007 and 2008 by Margaret Gowen and Co. Ltd under licence 07E0574, the intact deposits that survived the modern disturbance contained occasional sherds of medieval pottery and fragments of shell and charcoal. The excavator, Moriarty, concluded that the mound may in fact be medieval in date rather than prehistoric, and possibly connected to the medieval village known to have existed to the north-east. Testing south of the mound also revealed traces of an oval enclosure, which may have functioned as a bailey, the defended courtyard typically associated with an earthen motte; in other words, the mound itself might once have been the raised platform of a motte-and-bailey fortification. Further excavation by Gill McLoughlin of Courtney Deery Heritage Consultancy Ltd in 2016, carried out in advance of the residential development to the south-east, confirmed that most of the associated enclosure had been removed under licence before construction, though the northern portion within the 20-metre buffer zone around the mound was preserved in place.

The mound is now accessible as a small green space within the housing development at Station Road in Portmarnock, and information signage has been installed on site. The monument itself is protected, and the line of the buried enclosure ditch within the buffer zone has been indicated through hard and soft landscaping, so something of the wider shape of the site remains legible at ground level for anyone willing to look for it. The coastal views from the slight rise are still there, largely unobstructed to the south and east, which may be part of why someone, in some century, chose this particular spot.