One of its tallest stones, a portal-like upright, is now embedded in the roadside boundary wall at the north-western corner, and the northern end of the chamber itself has been incorporated into the same structure, so that ancient and mundane architecture have become, over time, a single thing. A displaced roofstone leans against the eastern side, no longer covering anything.

Portal tombs, sometimes called dolmens, are among the most visually distinctive of Ireland's Neolithic funerary monuments, typically defined by two tall upright portal stones at the entrance supporting a large capstone. This example at Ballynew is ruined enough that the classification carries a degree of caution; Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, who catalogued it in their 1972 survey of megalithic tombs across the Irish midlands and west, described it as "very probably" of the portal-tomb class. The chamber itself is modest, roughly two metres long and just over a metre wide, aligned on a roughly north-south axis. It sits lower in the valley than one might expect, directly overlooking the lough, which gives the site an intimate relationship with the water below that grander, hilltop monuments rarely achieve.

The overlap between the tomb and the roadside fence is the detail that stays with you. It is not unusual for prehistoric monuments in Ireland to be pressed into agricultural or boundary use over the centuries, but to see a Neolithic upright doing active duty as a fence post, with a roofstone propped beside it like a discarded slab, makes the deep domestication of the ancient landscape unusually legible here.