Wedge tombs are the most numerous megalithic tomb type in Ireland, built roughly between 2500 and 2000 BC during the later Neolithic and into the Bronze Age; they take their name from the plan shape of the gallery, which typically narrows and lowers from front to back. The Cornaire example is modest but legible: a gallery 3.4 metres long and 1.1 metres wide at its southwestern end, open in the direction that most wedge tombs face, towards the south or west. Two sidestones define the northern wall, three the southern, and an inset backstone closes the eastern end. Beyond the north side, two outer-wall stones still stand, remnants of the kerbing or double-walling that often accompanied this tomb type. Faint traces of the original covering mound survive to the south and west of the gallery.

The tomb was recorded in detail by archaeologists Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin in their systematic survey of megalithic tombs across Munster, published in 1982. Their work placed this site within a broader pattern of wedge tomb distribution across Cork and Kerry, a landscape that contains a notably dense concentration of these monuments. The Cornaire tomb does not stand entirely alone; a second wedge tomb lies approximately 300 metres to the west, across the townland boundary into Cloghboola, suggesting that this valley head, now given over largely to bog, once held enough significance to attract more than one such monument. The steep, south-facing slope and the small platform carved out by the terrain would have made this a conspicuous and considered placement by whoever raised the structure.