A portal tomb half-collapsed in woodland on the floodplain of the River Suir is not what most people expect to find in County Waterford. The structure at Gurteen sits in a quiet, tree-covered lowland setting, an unusual location for this type of monument, which more often occupies exposed hilltops or open moorland. Its capstone, a large rectangular slab of sandstone, has slid from the upright portal-stones and now rests at an angle, while the southern sidestone has toppled and come to lie across what would have been the septal-stone, the thin dividing slab that separated the main chamber from a shallower front section. The southern portal-stone has also fallen forward. Only the northern side of the structure remains as originally built, with the northern portal-stone standing 2.2 metres high and the northern sidestone reaching 1.7 metres.

Portal tombs, sometimes called cromlechs in older literature, are megalithic burial monuments dating to the Neolithic period, generally thought to have been constructed between roughly 4000 and 3000 BC. They are characterised by two tall upright portal-stones at the entrance, a large capstone often tilted dramatically upward at the front, and a long, low chamber behind. The Gurteen example was recorded by William Copeland Borlase in 1897, in his substantial survey of Irish megalithic monuments, and later noted by Seán Ó Nualláin in 1983 as part of ongoing cataloguing of Irish portal tombs. Both researchers documented the structure in the condition it largely retains today, suggesting that its partial collapse is long-standing rather than recent. The use of sandstone boulders reflects the local geology of the Suir valley, where the harder igneous or metamorphic stones favoured at some other megalithic sites are less readily available.