That name, recorded in gothic lettering on the 1907 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, is the kind of folk designation that tends to attach itself to ancient monuments when their original purpose has long since dissolved into local memory and speculation. The structure itself is modest in what survives: two orthostats, which are the large standing slabs used in megalithic construction, bearing a single capstone or lintel between them.

The arrangement has been interpreted as the entrance to a court tomb, a type of Neolithic monument found across the north of Ireland, typically consisting of an open ceremonial forecourt leading into a roofed gallery used for burial. The scholar Ruaidhri de Valera, writing in 1960, suggested this reading of the Dunmaurice remains. The site sits on a gentle elevation between drumlins, the smooth rounded hills formed by glacial deposition that give this part of Monaghan its corrugated, intimate character. Around 150 metres to the east lies a small pot lough, a shallow circular lake occupying a hollow left by a melting block of buried ice at the end of the last glacial period. The combination of a slight rise, enclosed low ground, and a nearby water feature is not unusual for megalithic siting in Ireland, where such placements seem deliberate rather than incidental.