A cist is a box-like grave, typically constructed from flat stone slabs and covered with a capstone, used during the Bronze Age to inter the dead, sometimes with grave goods placed alongside. What makes this particular example quietly striking is the way it negotiates its own landscape: where the builders ran out of available slab material on the western side, they simply incorporated a natural outcrop of bedrock into the structure, using the living rock as one of the grave's walls.

Recorded by M. Gibbons, the cist measures 1.6 metres north to south and 0.6 metres east to west, with a depth of around 0.4 metres. It is built from thin schist slabs, between 0.1 and 0.15 metres thick, set end to end along the north, east, and southern sides, with double-walling reinforcing the north and south. A slab floor is still visible at the base of the eastern end. The whole structure sits centrally within a cairn, a mound of stones heaped over the grave, which measures roughly 4.2 metres by 3.4 metres and survives best in its north-eastern and southern sectors. Several of the larger covering slabs have been displaced over the centuries and now lie loose on the cairn's surface. The weight of the accumulated cairn material pressing against the northern wall has caused the cist sides to tilt slightly southward, a slow lean that has been building since the Bronze Age. A flint scraper recovered at the site points to that period as the likely date of construction. Approximately 25 metres to the north-east, traces of a possible contemporary hut site suggest this was once a worked and inhabited stretch of hillside, not merely a place chosen for burial.