These are cupmarks, among the most elemental forms of prehistoric rock art found in Ireland: simple bowl-shaped depressions ground or pecked into stone, their purpose still genuinely unknown. What makes this particular group unusual is where they were placed, not on an open outcrop or a hillside with commanding views, but on the capstone of a megalithic tomb, a prehistoric burial monument whose large covering stone has become, in effect, a canvas.

The capstone itself is a smooth, unfractured piece of sandstone, roughly rectangular in plan and measuring about 1.63 metres north to south by 1.47 metres east to west. The decorated area occupies the central portion of the upper surface, a subrectangular patch of around one metre by 0.9 metres, within which the sixteen cupmarks are well preserved. They vary considerably in scale, from the smallest at around 4.5 centimetres in diameter and just 6 millimetres deep, to the largest at 9 centimetres across and 30 millimetres deep. The stone currently tilts slightly towards the south-east, because one of the tomb's side stones has shifted inward under the weight of the capstone pressing down on it over the centuries.

The site sits at approximately 281 metres above sea level on a plateau area of a south-west-facing slope, surrounded on almost all sides by forestry plantation, with a laneway running close to the west. The enclosing trees cut off what might once have been open views across the landscape, so the experience of the place now is one of enclosure and quiet rather than any sense of elevation. The cupmarks, sitting precisely at the centre of their stone, are best appreciated by looking across the surface at a low angle, where the shallow depressions cast just enough shadow to make them legible.