The stone, roughly two feet square, covered a small stone-lined box burial of the kind known as a cist or kistvaen, a type of prehistoric grave formed by setting flat slabs upright to create a chamber, then sealing it from above. Inside were three or four small cups and a single bronze ring, placed at the centre of the cavity. The cups were smashed shortly after discovery, and the ring was kept by the landowner. No record was made of any human remains.

The account comes from Atkinson, writing between 1879 and 1882, who was describing events some twenty years after they occurred. The absence of bones in his report is the detail that has troubled later researchers. The archaeologist John Waddell, writing in 1990, pointed out that the find does not map neatly onto what we would expect from a straightforward Bronze Age burial. Cists of this type typically contain skeletal remains, whether inhumed or cremated, alongside grave goods. Here, the combination of small ceramic vessels and a bronze ring, with no mention of bone, left the question open: was this a burial whose organic contents had simply not survived or gone unrecorded, or was it something closer to a deliberate deposit, a hoard placed in a stone-lined pit for reasons that were not funerary at all? The destruction of the cups makes the question harder to resolve, since analysis of their form and fabric might have offered a clearer date or cultural context.