The wedge tomb at Gortlecka, tucked within a thicket of trees and bushes on a pasture shelf above flood-prone ground near Coolreash Lough, had been pressed into domestic service, its ancient chamber serving as the bedroom of a small cabin. Wedge tombs are a type of megalithic monument built during the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, their galleries typically tapering in height and width from one end to the other, and this example in County Clare fits the form precisely. That someone found it a serviceable place to sleep is perhaps less surprising once you see the dimensions: the chamber stands 1.6 metres high at its wider end, roofed by a single slab more than three metres long.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited in 1905 and recorded details that still catch the attention of anyone studying the site. He noted that the inner faces of the two sidestones had been worked to a smoothness he said he had hardly ever encountered elsewhere, even to a much lesser degree, an unusual finish for a monument of this type. He also described what he called curious footmarks and other depressions on the roofstone, the nature of which he left unexplained. The site was mapped as early as 1842, when the first Ordnance Survey six-inch sheets labelled it simply as a cromlech, an older term once applied broadly to megalithic structures. When Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin surveyed it in 1961 for their systematic catalogue of megalithic tombs, they found a well-preserved but heavily overgrown trapezoidal chamber set into an oval mound roughly eleven metres along its longer axis. The sidestones lean slightly inward, their upper edges carefully dressed; the rectangular backstone at the narrower northeastern end also shows signs of deliberate shaping. A displaced slab leans against the southwestern end of the chamber, partly blocking what would have been the entrance.

A path to the tomb from the southeast was created in 2007, making approach easier than it once was, though the surrounding trees and bushes remain dense. The site sits on a shelf of improved pasture, and the low ground to the southeast floods seasonally from the lough to the north, so the drier months make for a more straightforward visit. Once inside the thicket, it is worth looking closely at the inner faces of the sidestones and at the surface of the roofstone, where Westropp's mysterious depressions may still be visible to a careful eye.