A landowner bored a hole through it, fitted it as a pillar, and only returned it to the site, according to a 1944 account by O'Kelly, out of superstitious fears. That small detail says a great deal about the monument's condition by the twentieth century, and about the complicated relationship between farming life and the ancient structures that prehistoric communities left scattered across the Limerick landscape.

The site sits in a field locally known as the 'altar field', near Lough Gur in County Limerick, a area long recognised for its concentration of prehistoric remains. It was noted in print as early as 1833, when Croker recorded an observation by Fitzgerald and McGregor that two megalithic structures lay less than half a mile south of a cromlech on Bailenalycailleah hill, and that a farmer had already broken one down and carried off two of its stones to make gateway pillars. By the time O'Kelly examined what remained in 1944, only one side stone of the original chamber was still upright, with a possible capstone resting on it. The capstone is the large flat stone that would have formed the roof of a megalithic burial chamber. A third stone was partly embedded in a field fence. In 1978, ahead of agricultural improvement works that would have removed the monument entirely, a rescue excavation was carried out by Cleary and Jones. They recorded three limestone boulders of considerable size, the largest measuring two metres in length, partially overlapping one another, with small stones scattered around them from years of field clearance and the ground surface worn down by cattle. Beneath this disorder, excavation revealed a polygonal cist, a small stone-lined burial box constructed from limestone slabs.

The site is in agricultural land and access would require local enquiry. Visitors to the broader Lough Gur area will find the landscape dense with prehistoric monuments, and the 'altar field' structure, reduced and damaged as it is, represents a category of monument whose losses were often quiet and incremental, a stone repurposed here, a field improved there, until very little remained above ground to explain what had once stood.