The discovery came in 1985 when a homeowner began building a wall and struck stone. What emerged was a pair of cists, the term for a box-like burial chamber constructed from flat slabs of stone, typically dating to the Bronze Age, though the precise period here was not established.

A rescue excavation was carried out by the Office of Public Works to record what the construction work had disturbed. The western of the two graves sat just forty to fifty centimetres below the surface. It was a carefully made structure: a rectangular cist nearly 1.9 metres long and just over half a metre wide, its sides formed by five stone slabs on the north face and four on the south, with a single confirmed endstone at the east end and the remains of four capstones, the covering slabs, surviving at that same end. The grave was oriented east to west. By the time archaeologists arrived, however, the skeleton or skeletons that had once lain inside were gone, removed before the excavation could properly begin. Only small fragments of bone remained in the disturbed fill, leaving the question of who was buried there, and how long ago, largely unanswered.