That layering of uses, separated by millennia, is quietly typical of the Burren, where the same flat, unyielding rock that drew Neolithic communities also shaped the agricultural routines of more recent centuries. The tomb at Gortlecka sits on level, exposed limestone pavement, open to the sky and the wind, with Loch Gealáin visible to the south-west and the bulk of Mullaghmore rising to the east.

A wedge tomb is one of the most common megalithic tomb types in Ireland, generally consisting of a roofed gallery that is wider and taller at one end, tapering toward the other, and usually oriented to face the setting sun in the west or south-west. The Gortlecka example follows the expected alignment, running roughly north-east to south-west, though it has not survived intact. The most imposing element remaining is a single large sidestone on the south-east, measuring 3.7 metres in length and 1.5 metres in height. Three smaller sidestones define the north-west side, two of which now lean outward, and the upper portion of the south-west slab has broken away and fallen. A substantial fragment of what was once the roofstone, 2.4 metres long, remains inside the north-east end of the chamber, propped against the south-east sidestone. The interior is otherwise filled with rubble, and a flat slab just to the south-west of the structure may originally have been part of the tomb itself. The site was recorded by Ó Nualláin as part of the Megalithic Survey of Ireland in 1989.

What makes the place linger is the contrast between the scale of the original construction and the matter-of-fact way a later enclosure was simply added to it. The livestock pen, built against the outer face of that large south-east sidestone, treats the ancient megalith as a convenient ready-made wall. Whether the people who built the pen had any sense of what the stones had originally been is impossible to know, but the result is a structure that compresses a very long stretch of human activity into a small area of pavement.