What remains visible is minimal: a chamber roughly 2.4 metres long and a metre wide, oriented northwest to southeast, with most of its fabric consumed by peat. A displaced roofstone leans against the backstone at the southeastern end, knocked from its original position at some point in the monument's long history, and two transversely set jambs flank a low sillstone, suggesting that the gallery once continued further to the northwest than what survives today.

What can be pieced together points to this being the rear chamber of a court tomb, one of Ireland's oldest monument types. Court tombs, built during the Neolithic period roughly five to six thousand years ago, typically consist of a roofed stone gallery divided into burial chambers, approached through an unroofed semicircular forecourt. The forecourt, which gives the type its name, is thought to have served a ceremonial function. Here at Couravoughil, the forecourt and much of the gallery have either collapsed or been swallowed by the surrounding bog, leaving only the innermost section. The bog's advance has been thorough enough that even locating the monument accurately proved troublesome; the position marked on the Record of Monuments and Places map produced in 1997 was noted as incorrect, meaning the tomb has spent recent decades misplotted on the official record as well as half-buried in peat.