There is no mound, no upright stone, no visible marker of any kind. The grave is a cist, a small stone-lined box of the kind commonly used for Bronze Age burials in Ireland, and it is modest even by those standards: just 0.55 metres long, 0.4 metres wide, and 0.4 metres deep, sealed with a single capstone and aligned east to west. Inside, the cremated remains of an adult were placed and then, at some point lost to time, the whole thing was covered over and forgotten.

The site sits on a gentle south-facing slope, and while its exact age has not been pinned down in the available record, cist burials of this type belong broadly to the Bronze Age tradition documented across Ireland. The burial was noted in published sources by Hartnett in 1952 and later by Waddell in 1990. Then, in 2008, a geophysical survey of part of the area produced something unexpected. The survey, registered as 08R127, detected a concentration of curvilinear ditch-type responses in the ground, along with signals described as indicative of intensive burning or firing activity. Geophysical surveys of this kind read subsurface anomalies without breaking the ground, and what they found here suggests the immediate landscape around the cist may be considerably more complex than a single modest grave implies. The curvilinear responses could point to an enclosure or ring-feature of some sort, while the burning signatures raise questions about ritual activity that may have taken place at or near the site.

For now, those questions remain open. The cist itself is invisible from ground level, and without excavation the full picture of what lies beneath the hillock at Ballynerrin stays out of reach.