The discovery came not from a purpose-led excavation but from the kind of infrastructural necessity that has, over the decades, revealed more of Ireland's prehistoric past than almost any planned dig.

The burial was found within a barrow, the broad term for a prehistoric earthen mound raised over the dead, though this particular example remains unclassified in type. What made the find especially interesting was its character as a secondary insertion: someone had returned to an already-existing mound and added a new burial to its eastern side, placing the cremated remains of an adult, sex unknown, into a pit cut into the body of the barrow. Alongside the human bones were cremated animal bones, twelve fragments of chert, a flint-like stone used for making tools and strike-a-lights, and five decorated pottery sherds identified as Food Vessel type, or closely resembling it. Food Vessels are a class of Bronze Age pottery, typically associated with burial deposits in Britain and Ireland, often finely decorated with impressed or incised patterns, and dating broadly to the earlier part of the second millennium BC. The excavation was published by Danaher in 1964, and the assemblage it described, cremated remains accompanied by animal bone, pottery, and worked stone, points to a moment of deliberate and layered ritual, one community burying its dead within ground that already carried the weight of earlier use.