What makes it worth pausing over is precisely its modesty: roughly two metres long and just over a metre wide, it is an intimate thing, built to a human scale rather than the monumental proportions that tend to draw attention. No trace of the earthen mound that would originally have enclosed it survives at ground level, so the stones present themselves plainly, unadorned and unframed by anything except the valley slope behind them.

This is a wedge tomb, the most numerous class of megalithic monument in Ireland, and one of the more distinctive. Wedge tombs take their name from the tapering plan of the burial gallery, which is typically wider and taller at the western entrance and narrows toward the east. This example at Bealick follows that convention precisely: the gallery widens slightly from west to east in width, while the height decreases in the same direction, producing the characteristic wedge profile. It is aligned WNW to ESE, an orientation shared by the great majority of wedge tombs, broadly facing the setting sun. The structure is made up of two sidestones to the north, one to the south, and a backstone closing the eastern end, with a single outer-wall stone surviving on the southern side and two loose slabs at the western end. Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin recorded it in their landmark Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, published in 1982, cataloguing it as County Cork number 23 and describing it as well preserved, which by the standards of a monument of this age is a considerable thing to be able to say.