What survives is fragmentary, but even in ruin it retains the distinctive anatomy of its type: the remnant of a funnel-shaped forecourt opening to the east, and a few metres to the west, the rear chamber of a gallery just three metres long and one metre wide. A large stone near the gallery entrance may once have been a jamb, one of the upright stones that would have framed a formal threshold into the burial space, though it has since shifted from its original position.

Court tombs are among the earliest megalithic monuments in Ireland, built by farming communities during the Neolithic period, roughly four to six thousand years ago. They take their name from the open, often semicircular or funnel-shaped forecourt at one end, which is thought to have served a ceremonial function, perhaps for rituals associated with the dead. The Sheeauns example belongs to this tradition, though so much of the original structure has been lost that the full plan is difficult to read. Low traces of a mound are still detectable to the north and south of the monument, suggesting the cairn of stones and earth that would once have covered and defined the whole structure. An old field wall to the southwest speaks to the site's long afterlife as ordinary farmland, its stones perhaps quarried in part from the monument itself over the centuries.