One of its stones was drilled through near one end and pressed into service as a gate-post, only to be returned to the site later when the landowner, apparently, thought better of it. The reason given for that return was superstitious fear, which says something about how these ancient monuments have always occupied a particular place in the local imagination, somewhere between inconvenience and unease.

The archaeologist M. J. O'Kelly described the site in 1944, by which point it was already, in his words, "very much defaced." What remained at the time of his survey was a single side stone of what had been a chamber, with a second stone resting upon it that may or may not have been a capstone, the large covering slab typically placed over the burial space of a megalithic tomb. The uncertainty matters because the stone's removal and reuse had scrambled any clear sense of its original position. A third stone, roughly 0.9 metres to the east, was partially embedded in a modern field fence, and O'Kelly could not determine whether it had originally served as an end stone, a side stone, or a capstone. Megalithic tombs of this kind, built during the Neolithic period, were collective burial monuments constructed from large upright stones, and their form, when intact, would have enclosed a defined chamber. At Grillagh, that form is largely gone.

The site is a reminder that not every ancient monument presents itself as a dramatic silhouette against the sky. This one is fragmentary, ambiguous, and tucked into a working agricultural landscape where a fence runs directly through the archaeology. Visitors interested in seeking it out should expect something subtle rather than monumental, a scatter of stones that requires a certain patience and a familiarity with O'Kelly's 1944 description to read with any confidence. The field context matters here; the embedded fence stone in particular illustrates how prehistoric remains and later land use have overlapped across centuries in the Irish countryside, sometimes literally.