The chamber itself was modest, less than a metre wide and under a metre deep, its walls built up from small stones and sealed with a capstone and a gritstone flag laid over the top. Inside sat an urn holding what were recorded as the incinerated remains of human bones. It is the kind of burial that tells you a great deal about ritual care and very little about the individual whose remains were placed there.

The structure is a cist, a type of prehistoric grave in which a box-like chamber is formed from stone slabs or drystone walling and set into the ground, often beneath a cairn of piled rocks. This particular example came to light in 1867, when it was uncovered by William Wilde, the Dublin surgeon, antiquarian, and father of Oscar, who documented a great deal of Irish archaeological material in the mid-nineteenth century. His published account, from 1872, records the urn and its contents in the language typical of the period, clinical and brief, but the find itself is a quiet marker of Bronze Age funerary practice in the west of Ireland, where cremation and cist burial were a common way of treating the dead.