Barely 0.6 metres high and roughly eight and a half metres across, it is built of boulders and would be easy to mistake for a natural accumulation of stone, were it not for two details: a scatter of crushed quartz towards its centre, and the western edge, which is deliberately shaped by two concentric arcs of low stones. That quartz is not incidental. Crushed or white quartz appears repeatedly at prehistoric burial and ritual monuments across Ireland, and is generally understood to have carried some kind of ceremonial significance, possibly connected to light or to the marking of boundaries between the living and the dead.

The cairn does not stand alone. Nine metres to the west, a pair of standing stones occupies the same rough terrace of ground, and a second cairn lies some seventy metres to the north-north-west. This clustering is characteristic of prehistoric ritual landscapes in West Cork, where monuments of different types were often positioned in deliberate spatial relation to one another rather than sited in isolation. The grouping here, recorded by O'Brien in 1970, suggests a tract of ground that held particular significance over a long period, though the precise date and function of the cairn itself remain uncertain. Cairns of this kind are broadly prehistoric, but without excavation it is difficult to be more specific.