The monument only reveals itself once you have already climbed to it, a quality that gives it an oddly secretive character for something that was presumably built, at least in part, to be seen. A dolmen is a type of prehistoric portal tomb, typically consisting of two or more upright stones supporting a large flat capstone, and this one tilts gently westward, as if slowly bowing in that direction over the millennia.

When Ordnance Survey officers passed through the area in the nineteenth century, they recorded its dimensions with some care. The capstone, oriented east to west, measures roughly 2.1 metres along that axis and just over 1.4 metres from north to south. The uprights that support it were already buried too deep in the earth to measure at the time of that survey, a detail noted in the OS letters compiled by O'Flanagan and published in 1930. The monument had been marked simply as 'Cromlech' on the first-edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map of 1840, using a term that was once applied loosely to various megalithic structures before 'dolmen' became the more common designation. The site was later referenced by the antiquarian W.C. Borlase in 1897 and again by De Valera and Ó Nualláin in their systematic survey of Irish megalithic tombs, published in 1982. A field boundary to the east of the monument has been partially removed at some point, and a modern bungalow now sits in its vicinity, giving the surrounding landscape a somewhat layered quality, prehistoric and recent in uncomfortable proximity.