The site at Buncrowey came to light during turf cutting in the 1960s, and what it revealed was quietly peculiar: a central pile of stones built over hearths and areas of burning, ringed by a narrow fosse, a ditch-like feature cut into the ground, with small timber stakes lying horizontally along its bottom. Beyond the fosse, a low enclosing wall of small rounded boulders, roughly a metre wide and less than half a metre high, completed what appears to have been a deliberately organised domestic or ritual space set into a broad, flat expanse of bog between the valley of the Buncrowey River to the east and a small stream valley to the west.

When inspectors first examined the monument in 1963, peat still partly covered it, and further turf cutting through the decade gradually exposed more of the cairn's extent. By 1994, enough had been revealed to take measurements: the cairn ran approximately 5.5 metres northwest to southeast and 4 metres northeast to southwest, standing around 0.7 metres high, positioned slightly off-centre within an irregular enclosing wall that defined an area roughly 11 metres by 9.5 metres. The fosse that had separated the cairn from the outer wall was by then no longer visible, filled in or collapsed. By the time of a further inspection in 2014, the cairn had diminished to a low rise of only 0.3 to 0.4 metres, somewhere between 6 and 7 metres across, entirely consumed by thick heather and tipped with willow scrub at its northern end. What turf cutting had uncovered across five decades, the bog was quietly reclaiming.