Wedge tombs are the most numerous megalithic tomb type in Ireland, named for the way their gallery tapers in both height and width from one end to the other. This particular example is more completely understood than most, thanks to excavation in 1957 and the radiocarbon dating work that followed decades later, which together give an unusually precise picture of how and when it was built and used.

The 1957 excavation, published by O'Kelly in 1958, uncovered a gallery aligned roughly north-east to south-west, nearly six metres long and wider at its south-west entrance end than at its north-east close. A low sill stone and a jamb-like slab divide the main chamber from a portico, the covered porch-like space just inside the entrance, where a small pillar stone still stands. The whole gallery sits within a U-shaped setting of outer walling, thickened and doubled toward the south-west, and the entire structure was once enveloped in an ovoid cairn, a mound of stones roughly eleven and a half metres long and nearly ten wide, ringed with kerb stones set into sockets at its edge. Three cremated burials were recovered from the main chamber, placed in shallow pits at different points along its length, along with three worked flints. A small hearth lay just outside the outer walling to the north. Radiocarbon dates, analysed by Brindley and Lanting in the early 1990s, placed the primary activity within a calibrated range of roughly 1412 to 1308 BC, suggesting construction in the early Bronze Age, with a later enhancement in the form of the concentric kerb setting. The tomb does not stand entirely alone in this landscape; a possible second megalithic tomb lies about sixty metres to the south-west, and a pair of standing stones sits roughly 350 metres to the north-east, hinting at a broader pattern of deliberate monument-building across this stretch of north Cork.