What makes the arrangement quietly arresting is not just the cist itself but its relationship to the surrounding landscape: immediately outside the fosse, or defensive ditch, of a nearby rath, it occupies ground that has been claimed, marked, and re-marked by different peoples across very different periods of Irish prehistory and early history.

A cist is a small, box-shaped grave, typically constructed from flat slabs and used to hold a single crouched burial or cremated remains, most commonly during the Bronze Age. This one protrudes from the northern edge of a cairn, a mounded pile of stones that would itself have served as a burial monument. The cist measures roughly 1.5 metres north to south and 0.5 metres east to west, with a height of around 0.4 metres. Its long side-stones run along the east and west, an end-stone closes it at the south, and it remains open at the north. A substantial roof-stone, measuring approximately 1.3 metres by 1.2 metres and nearly half a metre thick, sits across the top, giving the structure a solidity that has allowed it to survive in recognisable form. The proximity of the cist to the rath, a circular earthwork enclosure associated with early medieval settlement, suggests that whoever built or used the rath was likely aware of the older monument beside them, though whether they regarded it with reverence, indifference, or something else entirely is not something the stones can say.