It is easy to walk past without quite registering what you are looking at, but this modest arrangement is a cist, a small stone-lined grave box of the type widely used in Bronze Age Ireland for individual burials, often containing crouched remains and occasionally a ceramic vessel or personal object placed alongside the dead.

Cist burials were typically inserted into the ground and covered over, which means that what is visible today at Lackan, the capstone apparently still resting on its uprights above the slope, represents either a structure that has partly emerged as the surrounding soil eroded away, or one that was always more exposed than most. The south to south-westerly orientation of the slope where it sits is not uncommon for such sites; many prehistoric monuments in Ireland were positioned with deliberate attention to aspect, light, and the movement of the sun across the landscape, though whether that consideration guided whoever chose this particular hillside is now impossible to say with certainty.