It sits embedded in the face of a low cliff at the mouth of the Bunowen River, about three metres above the strand, and it was the erosion of that cliff during the winter of 2014 to 2015 that exposed it in the first place. What survives is only the eastern portion of a slab-lined grave, a type of burial in which the body is enclosed within a small stone-walled and stone-roofed box built directly into the ground. The western end has already gone, scoured away by the Atlantic weather, and the remnant that remains is a cavity barely 0.8 metres long, its roof formed by two thin overlapping slabs, its floor paved with two more, and a small upright stone sealing the eastern end.

A rescue excavation led by archaeologist Richard Crumlish was carried out over nine days in late August and early September 2016, funded by the National Monuments Service. Because the cliff face was unstable, the stone structure itself was left in place, but the sandy fill inside the grave was carefully excavated, and the collapsed soil at the base of the cliff was sieved. The results were fragmentary but telling. Bone fragments recovered from within the grave and from the displaced material at the cliff foot included two skull fragments, part of a jaw, pieces of collar bone and shoulder blade, rib fragments, the left humerus, and fragments of finger and toe bones. Only the toe bones remained where they had originally been placed. Osteoarchaeological analysis suggested the remains belonged to a young adult male, most likely aged between twenty and thirty at the time of death. The orientation of the grave, east to west with the head placed to the west, follows the conventions of early Christian burial, in which the body would face east towards the rising sun on the day of resurrection. Radiocarbon dating of the humerus placed the burial within the period 549 to 653 AD, situating this individual firmly in the early medieval period, when Christianity was still consolidating its presence across Ireland and simple slab-lined graves of this kind were a common form of interment.

The grave is visible in the cliff face at a height of roughly two metres above the beach, approximately 500 metres north of Louisburg village. The site is actively eroding, and the portion that survives does so only because it extends back into the body of the cliff; there is no certainty about how long it will remain.