Few pause to consider the scatter of boulders sitting quietly about 60 metres to its south, and fewer still would recognise it as the remnant of a separate passage tomb. Passage tombs are Neolithic chambered monuments, typically consisting of a stone-lined corridor leading to a burial chamber, the whole covered by a cairn of stones or earth. What survives here is a loose, irregular cluster of twelve gneiss boulders, only one of which still stands upright, at a modest 0.7 metres high. It is not a dramatic sight, but that modesty is itself instructive: this was once, apparently, a structured monument with a cist, the box-like stone chamber at the heart of such a tomb, and a surrounding stone circle.

Writing in 1888, the antiquarian W. G. Wood-Martin described the site as a ruined circle with eight stones and four of the cist still remaining at that point, suggesting the monument had already suffered considerable loss before he documented it. That deterioration may have an identifiable cause. According to Stefan Bergh's 1995 study of the Knocknarea complex, the site was likely disturbed in the early 1800s by Richard Chamber Walker, a local landowner with antiquarian interests. Walker's interventions, whatever form they took, appear to have left the monument in the scattered, ambiguous condition it presents today. The site sits within a remarkably dense concentration of prehistoric remains; a possible second passage tomb lies just 18 metres to the north, and two further cairns cluster within 30 metres to the south-south-west and south-east. The entire summit complex, with Maeve's Cairn at its centre, reflects a pattern seen at other Neolithic ceremonial landscapes in Ireland, where monuments accumulated around a dominant focal structure over generations.