The cist, a short cist specifically, is a type of prehistoric burial chamber built from stone slabs to enclose a single body or set of remains in a tight, box-like space. What makes the one at Sroove quietly remarkable is that it was not built with a single floor but three, each laid as a horizontal platform of large flat sandstone paving stones, one above the other, as though the space were being reset or reused with deliberate intention across different moments in time.

The cist sits in the south-eastern quadrant of a ring-cairn, a circular mound of stones, and was excavated alongside a second cist found a short distance to the south-west. Both were covered by a thin layer of cairn stones and edged by a low crescent-shaped setting of small upright stones called orthostats. When excavators opened this one, they found that the lowermost of the three floors concealed a pit containing hazelnuts, surrounded by and overlaid with cremated human bone. Above that, on the topmost floor, lay the main burial: the remains of a child, accompanied by two sherds of food-vessel pottery. Food vessels are a type of ceramic associated with Early Bronze Age burials in Ireland and Britain, typically placed with the dead as containers or offerings. The hazelnuts beneath the cremated bone add a further layer of uncertainty; whether they were food, a symbolic deposit, or something else entirely, the excavation record does not resolve.

The site was described by Wallace in 1974 and subsequently discussed by Waddell and by Ó Ríordáin and Waddell in later publications, placing it within a broader Bronze Age tradition of cist burial within cairn monuments found across Ireland. The layered construction of three separate floors within a single small cist has no straightforward explanation, and that ambiguity is part of what gives the site its quiet weight.