The find was modest in size but striking in what it represented: a small, carefully, if incompletely, constructed cist grave, the kind of Bronze Age burial in which a corpse or its ashes were placed within a box-like arrangement of flat stones and sealed beneath one or more capstones.

The Bealaclave cist was uncovered by a local farmer during routine ploughing and subsequently recorded by Etienne Rynne, whose account appeared in 1964. The grave itself was irregular in shape, set into an oval pit roughly 0.3 metres across. Several small stones formed a partial lining, with three possible capstones covering the top. At the bottom lay a small quantity of cremated human bone resting on a thick layer of charcoal, the charcoal likely a remnant of the funerary pyre. Cist graves of this type are found across Ireland and Britain and are generally associated with the Bronze Age, a period when cremation became increasingly common as a burial practice. What makes this one quietly notable is its incompleteness, whether the lining was always partial or whether some stones had shifted or been removed over the centuries is not known, but it gives the grave an improvisational quality that contrasts with more formally constructed examples.

There is nothing to see at the surface today. The site is not visible at ground level, and the upland setting at Bealaclave offers no obvious marker. The grave's contents were what mattered, and those have long since been lifted out of the soil and into the archaeological record.