A farmer building or reinforcing a dry-stone fence at some point in the past incorporated the ancient structure into it, so that the tomb and the fence are now effectively the same object. It is an oddly mundane fate for something several thousand years old.

The monument belongs to the wedge tomb class, the most numerous type of megalithic tomb in Ireland, typically dating to the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age, roughly 2500 to 2000 BC. Wedge tombs take their name from their characteristic shape: a roofed stone gallery that is wider and taller at the western end, tapering gradually toward the east. At Beennamweel, the gallery runs approximately 6.2 metres in length and is about 1.2 metres wide at its broader eastern end, with five sidestones visible along the northern side of the fence and two along the southern side. Four overlapping roofstones still protrude from the fence above the northern sidestones, and a single outer-wall stone, part of what would originally have been a low surrounding wall enclosing the monument, stands just north of the fence line. The sidestones decrease in height from west to east, a detail that, even in this ruined and half-buried condition, preserves the defining wedge profile. Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin catalogued the structure in their 1982 survey of megalithic tombs across Cork, Kerry, Limerick, and Tipperary, where it appears as number five in the Cork series.