A boulder-burial, a form of Bronze Age grave marker in which a large, often wedge-shaped capstone is propped above a small number of support stones rather than enclosed by a full chamber, stood here until the spring of 1977, when it was destroyed. The loss is quiet and unremarked upon by the landscape itself, which gives no sign that anything was ever there.

What had survived long enough to be recorded was a substantial capstone measuring 1.9 metres by 1.35 metres, with a thickness of 0.7 metres, balanced above three support stones. Boulder-burials are found almost exclusively in the south-west of Ireland, and West Cork has a particular concentration of them. This site was not entirely isolated even before its destruction; two further boulder-burials at Ballynacarriga lie roughly 240 metres and 350 metres to the south-west, suggesting that this corner of the bay held some significance across a long period of prehistoric use. Whether those two monuments survive in better condition, their proximity at least indicates that the Garinish example was part of a broader, if loosely grouped, funerary landscape rather than an outlier.