That degree of preservation is genuinely unusual. Most megalithic tombs of this type have been robbed of their stones over the centuries, dismantled for field walls or farm buildings, yet this one retains much of its original form, including what appears to be a substantial amount of the cairn material, the mound of loose stone that would originally have covered the tomb's internal chamber.

The structure is a wedge tomb, a type of megalithic burial monument built in Ireland during the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, roughly between 2500 and 2000 BC. Wedge tombs take their name from their characteristic shape, wider and taller at the front and tapering toward the rear, and they are the most numerous megalithic tomb type in Ireland, found predominantly in the west of the country. This particular example was identified by local man Paddy Bushe and subsequently described by John Sheehan of University College Cork, who noted that the side stones are slightly displaced but that the overall structure remains remarkably coherent. It sits on a ridge orientated north-north-east to south-south-west, a positioning that, like many monuments of this kind, appears deliberate in relation to the surrounding landscape and the waters of the bay below.