The arrangement is compact enough to step over, yet deliberate enough to stop you in your tracks. This is a prehistoric cist, a type of stone-lined grave box typically used for individual burials during the Bronze Age, and its proportions are precise: the internal width between the rows is just over half a metre, the whole structure barely more than a metre long. What makes it quietly odd is the way the stones graduate in height from south to north, the taller western pair reaching 0.9 metres, the eastern trio sitting lower at 0.55 metres, giving the whole thing a slightly stepped, asymmetric quality that no practical explanation quite accounts for.

The cist consists of two parallel rows of large, flat, slab-like stones set on edge and oriented roughly north to south, with the gap between them filled in by large loose stones. The eastern row is made up of three stones and runs the full length of the structure at 1.14 metres; the western row has two stones and is somewhat shorter at 0.82 metres. The plateau on which it sits is karst limestone terrain, the same ancient, fissured rock that defines so much of the Burren landscape in this part of Clare. Roughly 24 metres to the south-west lies a wedge tomb, a different and generally earlier monument type in which a long, tapering stone gallery was used for communal burial. Having both a wedge tomb and a cist in such close proximity suggests the area was returned to for funerary purposes across a considerable stretch of prehistoric time, even if the precise relationship between the two structures remains unclear.