It is a wedge tomb, the most numerous type of megalithic monument in Ireland, built by farming communities during the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, roughly 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. Wedge tombs take their name from their plan shape, wider and taller at the west end and tapering toward the east, and they were collective burial places, their galleries used over generations. This one looks out over the valley of the Glengarriff River and, beyond it, the harbour to the south-east, a prospect that may or may not have figured in the thinking of whoever chose this particular hillside.

What survives is a gallery just 3.4 metres long and about a metre wide at its broadest point, narrowing slightly toward the eastern end. Three sidestones remain on the northern side, with a backstone closing the eastern end, and a single slab marking part of the southern side. A large roofstone, measuring 2.25 metres by 1.3 metres and roughly 25 centimetres thick, still covers the greater portion of the eastern section of the gallery, which is the more protected inner end of the structure. A prostrate slab at the western end may be a fallen sidestone, though it could equally be a displaced roofstone. Two outer-wall stones, which would originally have helped define the outer shell of the monument, still stand to the north of the gallery, and at the eastern end there are the faint remains of a grass-covered mound, the eroded remnant of the cairn that once enclosed the whole structure.