Just over two and a half metres across at its widest point and barely more than half a metre high, it is mostly grass-covered, though the stones beneath push through the surface in irregular clusters, giving the ground an uneven, lumpy character that distinguishes it from the surrounding terrain. It is a cairn, a deliberate accumulation of stones that in the Irish archaeological record most commonly marks a burial or serves as a territorial or ritual landmark, and its modest dimensions do nothing to diminish its age or purpose.

What makes the Deelis cairn particularly worth attention is its immediate context. Two hut sites lie within fifteen metres of it, one to the north-west and one to the south-east, suggesting that whoever raised this cairn was not alone in the landscape. Whether the huts and the cairn belong to the same period of activity is not certain, but their proximity points to a small cluster of human presence, people who lived and perhaps buried their dead within a very short distance of one another on this stretch of the Drimminboy riverbank. Hut sites of this kind in Kerry are often associated with early medieval or prehistoric settlement, sometimes temporary, sometimes more sustained, and the rough pasture that now surrounds the cairn would once have been worked or grazed by the same community that left these traces behind.