A cist is a small stone-lined box grave, typically constructed from upright slabs set into a pit in the ground, and this one had apparently lain undisturbed for several thousand years before the machinery caught it. What emerged was not just a burial, but a remarkably compact arrangement that preserved the remains of at least two individuals alongside one of the more elaborately decorated ceramic vessels known from this period.

The cist was subsequently investigated by Shee, working with O'Kelly, who found it lined with six upright stones averaging around half a metre in height, with a polygonal slab forming the base and the whole structure set into a pit measuring roughly 85 centimetres across and 75 centimetres deep. Inside, the cremated bones of a child and at least one adult had been covered by an inverted Enlarged Food Vessel Urn, a ceramic type associated with the Irish Early Bronze Age. The urn was carefully made: its neck slightly hollow and vertical, the shoulder smoothly curved, the body tapering toward the base. The decoration was dense and deliberate. The rim carried three parallel rows of impressed triangles on its outer bevel and alternating scored lines with impressed triangles on its inner surface. Three raised horizontal bands decorated with herringbone incisions ran around the neck, while raised vertical bands similarly decorated marked the shoulder. Below that, nine bands of obliquely set grooves ran around the body, each band tilting in the opposite direction to the one beside it. Separately, unburnt bones of a female adult were found in the disturbed ground around the cist, and a pit burial lay roughly 1.3 to 1.5 metres to the north-west, suggesting this small patch of North Cork farmland once served as something more than pasture.