The stones protrude less than a quarter of a metre above the surface, appearing as thin slabs barely distinguishable from the surrounding outcrops of rock. It is the kind of monument that asks a great deal of the imagination.

What survives, according to the survey work of Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, are four lines of stones oriented roughly northeast to southwest, most likely representing the side walls and outer walling of a gallery around five metres in length, with traces of a mound still detectable at the eastern end. The structure is tentatively identified as a wedge tomb, a type of megalithic burial monument widespread across Ireland and dating broadly to the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, typically characterised by a roofed gallery that narrows and lowers toward one end. The classification at Cappeen is not fully settled; de Valera and Ó Nualláin, writing in their 1982 volume covering the megalithic tombs of Counties Cork, Kerry, Limerick, and Tipperary, noted some uncertainty about the exact nature of the monument, while concluding that interpreting it as a wedge tomb was not inconsistent with the evidence available. That careful hedging is itself telling: this is a site at the edge of legibility, where millennia of bog, weather, and slow subsidence have reduced a once-substantial structure to something that barely announces itself.