For decades, the wedge tomb at Derrygortnacloghy was folded into a townland boundary fence, its prehistoric stonework pressed into service as a property line. The fence was eventually removed in 1991, freeing the monument from that strange dual existence, but the episode says something about how casually ancient things can become part of the mundane landscape.

The tomb sits on a low ridge in the northeastern foothills of the Shehy Mountains, looking out over the River Lee valley to the north. It is a wedge tomb, a type of megalithic burial structure common in Ireland and typically dating to the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age, characterised by a long, tapering stone gallery that is wider and taller at the western end than the eastern. This example follows the form closely: the gallery runs east to west, measuring 3.5 metres in length, 1.6 metres wide at the western end narrowing to 1.1 metres at the east, and standing 1.5 metres high at its tallest point. One sidestone survives to the north, two to the south, with an apparent backstone set into the eastern end and three outer-wall stones running along the southern side. A single roofstone covers the gallery. The detail that lingers, noted by Finlay in 1973, is that the capstone carries cup marks, small, deliberately ground circular hollows whose precise meaning remains contested but which appear on megalithic monuments across Ireland and Britain, suggesting some form of ritual or symbolic use extending well beyond the tomb's original construction.