The burial it contained mixed two distinct funerary practices, inhumation of the body and cremation, in the same confined space. No grave-goods were found alongside the remains, which makes dating and interpretation difficult, but the physical construction of the grave itself is striking: a limestone slab roughly 2.14 metres by 1.21 metres, propped at a slant over the burial, with the eastern end sealed by a low curved dry-stone wall and the gap between wall and slab closed off with flat stones. Some of those stones had already collapsed inward by the time anyone recorded the structure properly.

The grave is a cist, a form of prehistoric burial in which a body or cremated remains are placed within a box-like chamber made from slabs of stone, often inserted into or near an existing monument. This particular cist was investigated in 1932 by Seán P. Ó Ríordáin, whose findings were published the following year. Ó Ríordáin concluded that the cist was not original to the cairn but had been added afterwards, constructed slightly outside the cairn's outer edge rather than within its body. He proposed a tentative Middle Bronze Age date for it, placing the burial somewhere in the period roughly 1500 to 1000 BC, though without grave-goods that date remains approximate. The combination of burial rites within a single cist, one person or set of remains inhumed, another cremated, is unusual and unexplained. Whether this reflects two separate interments at different times, or a deliberate act of combined burial, is not clear from what survives. Today, a large slab is visible in a hollow dug into the lower cairn at its east-north-eastern side, and this is thought likely to be the covering stone of the cist Ó Ríordáin examined.