That practical afterlife has left the structure largely intact, and the tomb now sits in good condition above the valley of the Ferta river, its western end open to a long view stretching south-west along the valley floor.

The tomb belongs to a class known as wedge tombs, the most numerous type of megalithic monument in Ireland, generally dating to the later Neolithic and early Bronze Age. The form is exactly what the name suggests: a roofed stone gallery that tapers in both width and height from one end to the other. At Caherlehillan, the gallery runs ENE to WSW and measures 3.7 metres in overall length. At its wider, taller western end it reaches 1.2 metres across and just over a metre in height; by the eastern end those dimensions have reduced to 1.1 metres and 0.75 metres respectively. Five upright slabs, called orthostats, define the two side walls, two on the north side and three on the south, and two large flat capstones cover the chamber above. The back-stone, unusually, sits outside the line of the gallery walls rather than closing the narrow end flush. An early observer, Lynch, recorded what appeared to be cupmarks on the upper surface of the roof-stones in 1906, but these have since been reconsidered and are more likely natural solution pits, shallow depressions formed by chemical weathering of the stone surface over millennia. In 1992, the western upright collapsed inward into the gallery, though the overall structure remains well-preserved.