The effect is quietly unsettling, somewhere between the deliberate and the geological, though the arrangement is almost certainly intentional. The main stone measures roughly 2.9 metres by 1.9 metres and stands about a metre in height, propped up in a manner that suggests it was placed, not simply left behind by a retreating glacier.

Boulder-burials are a largely Irish monument type, concentrated in the south-west of the country, particularly in Cork and Kerry. The form is exactly as the name suggests: a large, often substantial boulder raised on a small number of uprights, believed to cover a burial deposit beneath. They are generally assigned to the Bronze Age, and while they share a family resemblance with dolmens and portal tombs, they tend to be lower, less dramatic, and more easily overlooked in a landscape. The Bawngare example appears in Seán Ó Nualláin's 1978 survey of the monument type, catalogued as number 30, and again in Roberts's 1988 study of the region.