The tomb at Labbacallee sits in open pasture on a low, gently sloping knoll about 450 metres south of the Funshion River in north Cork, and what distinguishes it is not just its scale but the peculiar detail that emerged when it was excavated in 1934. A wedge tomb is a megalithic, or large-stone, burial monument typical of late Neolithic and early Bronze Age Ireland, so named because the gallery tapers in both height and width from a wider, taller western end toward a narrower eastern end. At Labbacallee, that gallery stretches 6.2 metres in length and stands 1.8 metres high at its western entrance, making it an unusually substantial example of the type.

The excavation, carried out by Leask and Price, revealed a monument of considerable complexity. The gallery is divided into a main chamber and a small eastern end chamber, the whole covered by three roofstones and flanked by massive outer walling. Kerbstones to the south enclose the low remains of a cairn, and three buttress stones stand at the eastern end. The ruined western end may originally have featured a portico, a kind of forecourt or entrance structure, though the evidence is inconclusive. It was on the floor of that small eastern end chamber that the primary burial was found: the headless skeleton of a woman, accompanied by burnt animal bones and a bone pin. Her skull, it seems, turned up elsewhere in the monument, among three skulls found with two inhumations in the main chamber. Above the floor of the end chamber lay cremated human remains and coarse pottery sherds. Radiocarbon dating has placed these burials within the range of 2202 to 2138 BC, a span of perhaps sixty years during which the tomb appears to have been used repeatedly for the interment of the dead.