It is roughly 20 metres long and 14 metres across, rising no more than a metre and a half at its highest point, and most of what it contains is buried. This is a wedge tomb, one of the most numerous megalithic tomb types in Ireland, so called because the roofed stone gallery they enclose typically narrows and lowers from front to back, like a wedge in plan. At Lickbla, the structure is ruinous enough that the upright stones forming the gallery walls, known as orthostats, are deeply swallowed by the enveloping mound, and four large flat stones lying along the gallery floor are most likely roofstones that have long since toppled from their original positions.

The tomb was recorded and described in detail by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin in their Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, published in 1972, which catalogued monuments across nine midland and western counties. Their account reveals a structure that, despite its ruined state, preserves enough to be classified with confidence. The gallery ran roughly north-north-east to south-south-west, measured at least 7 metres in length and approximately 1.3 metres in width. Fragments of an outer wall, a secondary stone skin that wrapped around the outside of many wedge tombs, survive on the eastern side, represented by two stones still more or less in position. A shallow circular depression about 2.3 metres across, just south of the gallery's end, is almost certainly the scar left by stone robbing at some point in the past. One upright stone embedded in a nearby fence, standing 1.15 metres high, may once have been part of the structure itself. To the north, the Hill of Mael and the Rock of Curry form the horizon, and roughly a mile to the north-west the pasture gives way to low flat bog, the kind of marginal landscape that frequently surrounds these prehistoric monuments and may have shaped the choices of the people who built them.