Around 1910, workers digging in a sand-pit came across a cist, a small stone-lined grave of the kind used across Bronze Age Ireland to hold the remains of the dead, and inside it were cremated human bones. The sand-pit setting is itself telling: cists are often discovered not through planned excavation but through the mundane business of extraction, when commercial digging cuts through ground that has been undisturbed for millennia.

The find was recorded thanks to a communication from Madam F. MacDermot, whose local knowledge preserved what might otherwise have gone entirely unnoticed. No formal excavation report appears to accompany the discovery, which places it in a long tradition of accidental Irish archaeological finds whose full context was lost at the moment of uncovering. Cist burials of this type are generally associated with the Bronze Age, a broad period running roughly from 2500 to 500 BC, during which cremation and inhumation were both practised, sometimes with small ceramic vessels or personal objects placed alongside the remains. Whether anything else was recovered from the Clogher cist is not recorded.