The locals and map-makers who recorded it on the 1916 edition of the Ordnance Survey called it "Dermot and Grania's Bed", a name applied across Ireland to megalithic monuments associated, often loosely, with the legendary fugitive lovers of the Fenian cycle. The name tells you more about folk imagination than about the tomb's actual origins, which belong to the Neolithic or early Bronze Age tradition of wedge tombs, a form of megalithic monument common in the west of Ireland in which the burial chamber tapers towards its closed eastern end and widens at the western entrance.

The antiquary Thomas Johnson Westropp visited the site and wrote about it in 1905, recording local names for it including "Labba" and "Lobba yermuth", and noting that it was tapered and oriented along an ESE-WNW axis, with the western end serving as the entrance. He also noted a hole in the southern sidestone, a detail that would have been unusual enough to attract attention. By the time he returned a year later, in 1906, he described it as collapsed, and the structural record compiled by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin for their 1961 Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland confirms how far the disintegration has progressed. The chamber, roughly 3.5 metres long and 2 metres wide, is bounded by large single slabs on its north and south sides, both of which have broken into pieces and lean outward. The western closing slab also tilts outwards, and fragments that may once have formed the roof now lie scattered within the chamber. A stone fence, probably of much more recent construction, has cut across the south-eastern edge of the monument, compounding the damage. Approximately 35 metres to the east stands a cashel, a type of dry-stone ringfort, suggesting this was once a landscape with multiple layers of occupation across different periods.

The tomb sits on gentle slopes with restricted views in most directions, though the hills of the eastern Burren are visible to the north-east. It was already marked on the six-inch Ordnance Survey map of 1840, which gives some indication of how long it has been recognised as a feature of the local landscape, even as its original form has continued to erode.