That name, informal and a little dismissive, turns out to undersell the place considerably. A wedge tomb is a type of megalithic burial monument characteristic of the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age in Ireland, so called because the gallery of upright stones, or orthostats, is wider and higher at the entrance than at the rear. The example at Ballyedmonduff is one of the more structurally complete specimens known, retaining much of its kerbstone circuit, its internal revetments, and the outline of a three-part gallery that opens westward from a horseshoe-shaped cairn.

When the antiquary O'Donovan first documented the site in 1837, he recorded it as a tumulus, a general term for a burial mound, because the cairn was still largely intact: an oval mound some 17 metres long, 12 metres wide, and 2 metres high. Over subsequent decades the cairn was progressively robbed of its stone, exposing the tips of the orthostats below. By the time Eugene O'Curry visited, he was moved to remark that he doubted whether a pagan grave as perfect had been encountered in any other county yet examined. Excavation finally came in 1945, conducted by Seán P. Ó Ríordáin and Ruaidhrí de Valera, and their findings were published between 1951 and 1953. The dig revealed a gallery divided into three sections, an ante-chamber, a main chamber 4.6 metres long, and an eastern end chamber whose side stones were augmented in a corbelled fashion, each flat stone projecting slightly beyond the one below to close the roof. The finds were exceptionally informative: around 150 pottery sherds, the great majority belonging to Bell Beaker vessels, the decorated drinking ware associated with a Europe-wide cultural horizon of roughly 2800 to 1800 BC. A pit cut into the main chamber floor contained cremated bone. Other recovered objects included flint scrapers, retouched flakes, an asymmetric arrowhead, and a perforated polished hammerstone with an hourglass-shaped perforation. A granite boulder lying loose on the southern side of the cairn carries seven small cupmarks on one surface, shallow circular hollows whose purpose remains debated among archaeologists.

The tomb sits within Ticknock Forest, and the tree cover that now entirely blocks the views was not there at the time of excavation, when the monument looked out broadly to the south and south-east. The site is a protected National Monument, subject to a preservation order dating from 1940 and taken into State Guardianship after excavation concluded. Access is on foot through the forest trails; the clearing where the monument stands is reasonably easy to locate but the surrounding conifers give it a different character from what O'Curry would have known. Look closely at the kerbstones, seventeen of the original twenty-five are still in position, and at the single upright orthostat that remains in place on the north side of the entrance, still standing 1.2 metres high after several thousand years.