A cist, to use the archaeological term, is essentially a small coffin-shaped chamber built from upright stone slabs and covered with a capstone; this one is larger than the companion cist set just centimetres to its north, whose position was so close that the two graves' capstones actually overlapped. The whole arrangement sits quietly in a working field, with Lough Carrowcon visible less than half a kilometre to the north-east.

The grave was excavated in 1933 by the Second Harvard Archaeological Expedition, with findings published by Hallam Movius the following year. The cist itself is roughly trapezoidal, oriented east to west, measuring just over a metre in length and half a metre deep. Four single upright limestone slabs form the walls, held steady by packing stones, and a massive capstone, nearly 1.75 metres long and weighing considerably more than it appears from the surface, seals the chamber. Inside, excavators found two distinct phases of use. The original burial was an inhumed individual, meaning a body placed in the grave intact rather than burned; analysis of the bones indicated an adult woman, estimated to have been between fifty and fifty-five years old at death. Her skull was found in the south-west corner, but the rest of her skeleton was, in Movius's own phrase, 'in complete confusion', having been disturbed at some later point when a cremation was introduced into the same space. The cremated remains, concentrated toward the eastern end of the cist but scattered throughout, represented two adult individuals. Two poorly preserved pottery sherds, from two different vessels, were also recovered from the floor. A flat slab found about thirty centimetres south of the cist, at a slightly deeper level, carried a small deposit of very fragmentary cremated bone; this was interpreted as material displaced from the main cremation rather than an entirely separate burial.

What the site quietly illustrates is the layered nature of prehistoric burial practice: a single small chamber reused across time, a woman interred and later moved aside, cremated remains of others added among her bones, and fragments of the whole scattered a short distance away. The hill itself, gentle and rounded, drops on its northern slope toward low-lying damp ground, the kind of topography that recurs around prehistoric monuments across the west of Ireland, suggesting the location was not chosen without intention.