Large flat slabs, set upright on their edges, form what appears to be the remains of a lintelled short cist, a type of small stone burial box used in later prehistory, typically constructed to hold a crouched inhumation or cremated remains along with a ceramic vessel. The hollow itself is uneven, dropping about two metres on its western side but only around half a metre where it opens eastward onto the wave-cut rock terraces at Clashymore.

The site came to wider attention in 1938, when it was examined by E. Estyn Evans, the geographer and ethnologist who did much to document Irish material culture in the mid-twentieth century. Evans was satisfied that the structure was a genuine later prehistoric funerary cist, and an associated urn or food vessel was recorded at the time. That ceramic piece has since been lost, or at least its current whereabouts are unknown, which is not unusual for finds made under informal conditions in the earlier decades of Irish archaeology. The site was later described by Heraughty in 1982, and further fieldwork carried out between 1998 and 2000 confirmed that the surviving edge-set slabs correspond to the north and east sides of the original cist, though the full structure no longer survives intact. What remains sits quietly in its hollow, overlooked by most visitors who make the effort to reach Inishmurray at all.