Around 1877, a stone cist, a small box-like grave constructed from upright slabs and a capstone, was uncovered at Cummer containing a ceramic urn and the cremated ashes of the dead. No record was made of its exact position, and the ground it occupied has since been built over, placing it beyond any straightforward investigation.

The find was recorded by Kinahan, writing between 1879 and 1888, who placed the cist approximately twenty metres north-west of a nearby ring-cairn, a type of Bronze Age monument consisting of a roughly circular bank of stones enclosing a burial. Kinahan believed the cist was probably associated with a flat cemetery in the same area, meaning a burial ground with no visible surface monument, which is itself a recognised but easily overlooked type of prehistoric site. The topography Kinahan described is precise enough to locate the general area: a south-facing slope just below a col, a low saddle of land, sitting between two hills roughly four hundred metres apart to the west and east, at an elevation forty to fifty metres above the col itself. That setting, gently elevated and sheltered, is characteristic of Bronze Age burial placement across Ireland. At the time of discovery, the immediate area was described as a concentrated settlement; by the time any formal record was made, the cist's exact coordinates had already been lost to memory and development.