The feature, stone-covered and roughly grave-shaped, was described in the Western People on 9th May 1931 as resembling a grave, measuring about six feet long and two feet wide beneath a slab of stone. Others at the time thought it might be a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically associated with early medieval settlement, used for storage or refuge. The uncertainty was never properly resolved, because the bones found inside, initially suspected to be human, were later identified as animal. They were reburied, the feature was covered back over, and the matter was, in effect, closed.

The site sits beside a north-south farm track on the western slope of an esker, one of the long, winding ridges of sand and gravel deposited by meltwater streams beneath glaciers during the last ice age. Eskers are common across the Irish midlands and west, and their elevated, well-drained ground made them attractive to people across many periods of history, from prehistoric burial to medieval routeways. Whether the stone-covered feature at Devlis was ever a burial, a storage structure, or something else entirely remains an open question. The animal bones offer no clear chronology, and the original structure is no longer visible above ground.

What does remain is a semi-circular depression cut into the esker slope, roughly six metres north to south and four metres east to west, marking where the 1931 discovery was made and subsequently reburied. It is the kind of place that registers as a slight wrongness in the land, a scoop in the hillside beside a working farm track, with nothing to explain itself.