At the crest of a ridge in the Monavullagh Mountains of County Waterford, there is a cairn so low and so weathered that it would be easy to walk past it without a second thought. Measuring roughly eight metres north to south and just over six metres east to west, it rises only thirty to sixty centimetres above the ground, its profile barely interrupting the ridge line. At its centre sits a hollow, and within that depression lie two contiguous stones that may once have formed part of a cist, a small stone-lined burial box of a kind commonly used in prehistoric Ireland to hold the remains of the dead.

The site sits above Bearna na Madra, a gap in the hills whose name translates roughly as the Pass of the Dogs, with views over the lowlands to both east and west. Its location, commanding that ridge line between the gap and the open country below, was almost certainly deliberate. According to research published by Michael Moore in 1995, this cairn forms part of a broader Bronze Age landscape in the Monavullagh Mountains, one that included both settlement and ritual activity. The cairn at Cutteen, then, was not an isolated monument but likely one element within a more complex upland world, used and understood by communities living and farming here during the Bronze Age, roughly four thousand or more years ago. The two stones surviving in the central hollow are suggestive rather than conclusive, their arrangement hinting at a burial function that time and disturbance have made difficult to confirm.