It is not a prehistoric feature. According to local information, the stone was moved there by someone, at some point, to stop animals getting inside. What makes this especially interesting is where that boulder may have come from: a holy well located roughly 350 metres to the north. A stone with probable sacred associations, repurposed as livestock management. It is a very Irish solution to a practical problem, and it tells you something about how ancient monuments get absorbed into everyday rural life over millennia.

The tomb itself is a wedge grave, a type of megalithic structure built during the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, typically consisting of a roofed gallery that tapers toward one end, set within or upon a cairn or mound. At Ballyslattery, a substantial capstone, nearly two and a half metres across in both directions and forty centimetres thick, rests on three large upright stones called orthostats, the tallest of which runs to 2.7 metres in length. The weight of that capstone has caused the northwest and southeast sidestones to tilt slightly, a slow geological fact now visible to the eye. Additional outer orthostats run parallel to the main weight-bearing ones, and the gaps between them are packed with compact earth and loose stones. Two large fallen slabs lie flat to the northwest and appear to have once formed part of the structure, perhaps elements of a portico, as Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin suggested in their 1961 survey of Clare's megalithic tombs. The associated mound, roughly circular and measuring about 13.5 metres east to west, survives, though a tree-lined field boundary cuts across its northern edge. The monument sits on a low rock outcrop in improved pasture and was already marked by name on the six-inch Ordnance Survey map of 1921, which suggests the local designation had been established for some time before anyone thought to write it down officially.