A wedge tomb is a megalithic burial monument, typically a roofed stone chamber narrowing and lowering from front to back, and this particular example is the most northerly of a cluster of four such tombs on Roughan Hill. What makes the site quietly arresting is less its condition, which is poor, than its scale: the surviving southern sidestone, broken into three sections, is estimated to weigh over four tonnes, making this one of the largest wedge tombs on the hill. When the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited in 1898 he noted what he called "strangely regular natural channels" running across the fallen northern stone; those channels have since been identified as natural limestone runnels, the same karst geology that shapes everything else in this landscape.

Westropp was not the first to take notice. John O'Donovan, writing in 1839, described the group as "three cromleachs in the same field, one of which is prostrate", which is more or less how the site appears today. Westropp himself recorded the tomb as the north-east cromlech of the Reabachan group and judged it must once have been a fine example, though by his time it was already "defaced". When excavations were carried out in 2016, as part of a broader project examining prehistoric society in the west of Ireland, the chamber was found to have been disturbed by badgers, yet despite this a substantial quantity of both cremated and unburnt bone was recovered. The low spread of stones around the tomb, long described as the indefinite remains of a mound, turned out not to be a proper cairn at all, but rather a series of paved areas laid to the front and rear of the chamber. A slab leaning against the inner face of the southern sidestone at its western end may be all that survives of the roofstone. Excavations across several nearby tombs have confirmed that the Roughan Hill group dates to the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age, a period spanning roughly 2500 to 1500 BC. The townlands of Parknabinnia, Leana, Caherfadda and Commons North together contain what has been identified as the densest concentration of wedge tombs anywhere in Ireland. Within a few hundred metres of this tomb lie the remains of at least four Chalcolithic or Early Bronze Age farmsteads, their boundaries defined by mound walls that are still legible in the terrain, suggesting that the people who built and used these tombs were also cultivating and enclosing this limestone plateau in ways that left permanent marks on the ground.