What makes it quietly arresting is not just its age but the way it has been used and misused across the centuries: the Ordnance Survey, at some point, built two trigonometrical stations directly on top of it, small circular cairns of stone heaped onto the monument's highest points as if the tomb were simply convenient high ground.

The tomb itself takes the form of a roughly circular cairn, measuring approximately 16.8 metres east to west and 17.2 metres north to south. Passage tombs are megalithic structures, typically consisting of a stone-lined corridor leading to one or more burial chambers, the whole assembly covered by a mound of earth or stone; this one belongs to a landscape dense with such monuments, visible from the summit in almost every direction. The Bricklieve Mountains, Knocknashee, Knocknarea, and even Croagh Patrick in Mayo can all be seen from here on a clear day. The cairn is best preserved in its south-western quadrant, while peat has buried much of the eastern and south-eastern edges. More significantly, the northern sector has been quarried away, opening up a roughly eight by five metre void and exposing four possible kerbstones along the edge and three possible orthostats, the large upright stones that would once have defined the internal structure, near the centre of the disturbed area. Kerbstones are the stones that define the outer boundary of a cairn, holding the mound material in place; their survival here, even partially, hints at how intact the original construction once was beneath the accumulated peat.