What survives today is more modest than the original. The remaining stones suggest the mound was once wedge-shaped and considerably larger, before centuries of robbing stripped away much of the body of the cairn. You can still trace a well-built retaining wall of slabs laid in courses running along one flank for around 50 feet, a curved section of the forecourt facade at the broad end, and a scatter of uprights and prostrate slabs. A low earth bank at one end is not part of the original monument, but some of the large stones jutting out of it once were.↗↗

There is no stone chamber or passage to crawl into here — unlike some Manx cairns, Ballafayle belonged to the long-barrow tradition without a megalithic chamber. Instead, the dead were cremated: excavators found cremated human remains and an abundance of peat ash and charcoal running down the centre of the mound, while many of the cairn stones bear the scars of great and prolonged heat, some actually fused by the fires that once burned within it. Standing among those fire-blackened stones, you are close to a real Neolithic ritual.↗↗↗