The effect is deliberate and ancient. This is a boulder-burial, a monument type found mainly along the Cork and Kerry coastline, in which a single substantial stone is raised above the ground on a small cluster of supporters, the whole arrangement likely marking a burial or place of ritual significance from the Bronze Age.

The boulder itself is subrectangular in outline, measuring roughly 2.75 metres by 1.7 metres and standing about a metre in height above its supports. It sits on a shelf of rough pasture on the northern face of the island's northern section, a location that is exposed rather than sheltered, the ground around it characterised by the kind of thin, coarse grazing common to Atlantic island landscapes. The site was catalogued by Seán Ó Nualláin in 1978, forming part of a broader survey of this distinctive monument type that helped establish boulder-burials as a recognised category of Irish prehistoric funerary architecture, concentrated heavily in Munster.

Clear Island, known in Irish as Oileán Chléire, is already a place that rewards the attentive visitor, but Gort Na Lobhar adds a quietly prehistoric dimension to its landscape. The boulder sits within open pasture, unenclosed and unfenced in any formal sense, meaning it can be approached on foot, though the rough terrain of the northern slopes requires some care. The monument is modest in scale compared to the great passage tombs of the Boyne Valley, but that modesty is part of what makes it arresting. Four stones, one boulder, and several thousand years of uninterrupted occupation of a hillside facing the grey Atlantic.