The romantic label is, in a sense, all that survives intact. In 1982 and 1983, land reclamation work almost entirely demolished the monument, leaving behind a scatter of displaced stones and a badly levelled site where a significant megalithic complex had stood for perhaps five thousand years.

Three seasons of excavation between 1984 and 1986, led by Gabriel Cooney, recovered enough to reconstruct the basic form. The monument had consisted of a long cairn, a type of elongated stone mound associated with communal Neolithic burial, with a portal tomb set on the main axis near its south-south-western end. Portal tombs, sometimes called dolmens, are defined by their paired upright portal-stones framing an entrance, and here those stones stood 1.55 metres high, with a lower doorstone between them. The chamber, roughly two metres long, had two inward-leaning sidestones but no surviving backstone. Some two metres to the north, a smaller subsidiary chamber occupied the western side of the cairn, its component orthostats, the upright slabs that form a megalithic chamber's walls, mostly fallen or displaced. Between the two chambers, a pair of set stones of uncertain function added further complexity to the arrangement. Traces of a slab-built revetment wall suggested the original cairn had been carefully edged and defined. Among the finds were flint and chert flakes, a concave scraper, and a hollow-based arrowhead, the last a form associated with the later Neolithic or early Bronze Age, hinting at a long period of use or revisitation. The site had first been formally recorded by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin in their 1972 survey of megalithic tombs, but the bulldozers arrived before any protective measures were in place.