On a north-south ridge in County Waterford, at the southern end of its summit, a passage tomb sits in rough pasture with a quiet stubbornness. Two of its five original lintels remain overhead. Twelve sidestones, six to each side, rise gradually in height as they move westward toward the backstone, creating a corridor six metres long that opens to the north-east. A kerb of twenty-seven stones, roughly nine metres in diameter, rings the passage, and outer support walls brace the sides. The ridge was recorded in the nineteenth century under the Irish name Carrick a Dhirra, and the monument has been described by visitors across nearly two centuries as essentially unchanged.

The tomb was first noted in print by the Reverend R. H. Ryland in 1824, and drew the attention of the Halls during their 1840 tour of Ireland. The Reverend G. H. Reade described it more fully in 1868 and 9, and noted even then that it had been robbed out. Excavation came in 1939, carried out by J. Hawkes, whose report appeared in 1941. The passage yielded the cremated remains of two individuals along with a stone pendant. Around the passage, a cairn roughly fifteen metres in diameter had spread beyond the upright stones, and within it excavators found a more complex picture than the stripped passage had suggested. Secondary burials, all cremations, had been placed into the cairn at a later period. These included one burial with a bowl food vessel, three with cordoned urns, which are a type of decorated ceramic container associated with Bronze Age funerary practice, one of those also containing a pygmy cup, a small accessory vessel whose precise function is still debated, and one urn that could not be classified. Two pits held the cremated remains of at least five further individuals. The objects accompanying these later burials included a razor, a faience bead, and perforated bone pins, faience being a glazed non-clay material used across prehistoric Europe for small ornamental objects. What began as a Neolithic passage tomb had, over centuries, become a focus for repeated Bronze Age burial activity.