It was opened at some point in the distant past, then partly filled in again, and by the time anyone thought to look closely at it with modern eyes, the central structure had all but disappeared into the robbed-out hollow of the cairn that once enclosed it.

The burial is a cist, a type of prehistoric stone-lined grave typically formed from upright slabs with a capstone, set within a cairn, which is a deliberate mound of stones often edged with a ring of larger kerb stones. This particular cairn is kerbed, and it was the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp who recorded its condition in 1913, noting that the central cist had been "long since opened and partly filled," though its chamber remained visible for around 1.5 metres inward at that time. Westropp was a prolific recorder of Clare's monuments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and his observations, however brief, often preserve details that later fieldwork cannot recover. When the site was inspected in 1999, the cist itself was no longer evident. The centre of the cairn had been further disturbed, the stones presumably carried off for use elsewhere, as happened to countless such structures across Ireland over the centuries.

What remains, then, is a kerbed cairn with a gap at its heart, a monument whose internal burial has been so thoroughly disrupted that it exists now mainly as a landscape feature and a question. The gap between Westropp's 1913 description and the 1999 inspection is less than ninety years, and in that interval the last visible traces of the cist vanished. It is the kind of incremental, undramatic loss that leaves almost no record behind.