Three further stones cluster under its northern edge. The arrangement is quiet and unassuming enough that a casual glance might read it as a geological accident, but it is not. This is a boulder-burial, a form of prehistoric monument found primarily in south-west Ireland, in which a substantial capstone is propped above the ground, typically over a shallow grave or burial deposit. They are cousins, in a loose sense, to the more familiar portal tombs and wedge tombs of the Irish prehistoric landscape, but boulder-burials are decidedly less theatrical, their scale intimate rather than monumental.

The Derryclogh example sits on level pasture on a slight south-facing slope, roughly 500 metres north of the Saivnose river. The capstone measures approximately 1.9 metres by 1.75 metres, and stands about a metre above the ground on its supports. The monument was catalogued by Roberts in 1988 and later included in the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork covering West Cork, published in 1992. Boulder-burials as a class are generally associated with the Bronze Age, and West Cork has one of the densest concentrations of them anywhere in Ireland, which makes a monument like this one less an isolated curiosity and more a local vernacular of the dead, a regional tradition repeated quietly across the landscape over centuries.