It is an easy thing to walk past without registering what you are looking at, but this is a boulder-burial, a prehistoric monument type found predominantly in the south-west of Ireland, in which a substantial capstone is raised on low supporters to create a modest but deliberate chamber. Unlike the grander portal tombs of other regions, boulder-burials are understated almost to the point of invisibility, sitting low in the landscape and blending readily into the rough terrain around them.

This particular example sits in hill pasture on boggy ground, on the western edge of a terrace that looks out over the harbour below. The boulder measures 1.35 metres east to west and 1.15 metres north to south, with a height of roughly half a metre, and its support-stones raise it only about ten centimetres off the surface beneath. It does not stand alone in the landscape. A network of old field boundaries runs through the surrounding area, and an enclosure of some kind lies approximately 26 metres to the south-east, suggesting that this patch of apparently empty hillside was once a good deal more organised and inhabited than it now appears. The precise date of the boulder-burial is not recorded, but the monument type is generally associated with the Bronze Age, a period when communities across Munster were marking the land with burials and boundaries in ways that still surface, quietly and unexpectedly, in the bog and pasture above the harbour.