That last detail, recorded by the antiquarian T. J. Westropp in 1905, is easy to linger on: a Neolithic wedge tomb, already several thousand years old, pressed into service as shelter for someone without better options.

A wedge tomb is a type of megalithic gallery grave characteristic of the Irish Bronze and Neolithic periods, typically wider and taller at its western end and narrowing toward the east, often associated with a covering mound. The example at Cappaghkennedy fits the form precisely. Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, who surveyed it in detail for their 1961 county-by-county catalogue of Irish megalithic tombs, recorded a chamber running east to west, just over three metres long, its single-slab sides dressed along their top edges with a degree of deliberate shaping. The broken capstone survives in two fragments, the eastern piece overlapping the western by about twenty centimetres, both still resting on the sidestones. The whole structure sits within a low oval mound, roughly twelve and a half metres long, which has been partially disrupted by later field walls running diagonally across it. Those walls speak to the site's position within what archaeologists identify as an extensive multi-period field system, meaning that people have been marking and dividing this land in overlapping waves for a very long time.

Westropp's 1905 drawing of the tomb showed a flat-lying basin-stone in its south-western corner, bearing five cupmarks on its upper surface. Cupmarks are shallow, cup-shaped depressions pecked into stone, found across prehistoric Europe but still not fully understood in terms of their purpose or meaning. Whether that stone remains in place is unclear; de Valera and Ó Nualláin noted a chamber floor of black earth strewn with stones, its western end partly blocked. Around the chamber itself they identified a double row of outer-walling, an arrangement of upright slabs converging toward the eastern end on both the north and south sides, with a further possible portico slab at the north-western corner. A survey visit in 1999 found the structure unaltered since the earlier twentieth-century accounts, sitting quietly on its upland pasture with wide views opening out to the south-west and north-east.