That it survives at all is something of a small miracle, because the ground immediately to its north has been quarried away, most likely removing whatever passage once led into the chamber it covers. The result is a monument that is simultaneously intact at its core and damaged at its approach, a megalithic room with no surviving door.

The tomb at Drumruekill sits on low-lying ground that slopes gently eastward and southward, ringed by the rounded glacial hills known as drumlins that are so characteristic of this part of Ireland. The cairn, a mounded heap of stones that would originally have covered and defined the whole structure, measures about 24 metres across, though it rises only modestly, from roughly 40 centimetres at its northern edge to about 1.6 metres on the eastern side. No kerbstones, the upright slabs that would typically have edged and retained the cairn, are visible at the surface. At the centre, two parallel sidestones aligned roughly north to south define a small chamber, little more than a metre and a half long and less than a metre wide. The roofstone above it is a substantial slab, 1.7 metres square and 25 centimetres thick, and it remains in position. Passage tombs, a type of megalithic burial monument generally dating to the Neolithic period, typically consist of exactly this arrangement: a covered chamber reached by a defined corridor, the whole thing buried within a cairn or mound. Here, a quarried cut measuring up to ten metres long, five metres wide, and roughly 80 centimetres deep sits immediately north of the chamber, and it is this disturbance that appears to have erased any trace of the original passage. Whether the quarrying happened centuries or millennia after the tomb was built is not recorded, but its effect on the monument's legibility is considerable.