The box in question is a cist, a Bronze Age burial form in which flat slabs are arranged into a tight rectangular chamber, sometimes barely large enough to hold a crouched body or, as here, a collection of cremated bones. This one measured roughly 65 centimetres along its longer axis and sat no deeper than 45 centimetres, its floor laid with rounded cobbled pebbles and its roof formed by a single capstone measuring 1.4 metres by 1 metre. Two pottery vases had been placed mouth-down on that cobbled floor, each covering a small quantity of cremated bone. Animal bones were present alongside the human remains, a detail that complicates any simple reading of the burial as purely funerary.

The cist was excavated in 1950 by Ó Ríordáin and Mac Dermott, whose findings were published in 1950 to 1951. It was not an isolated feature. Two further cists and two pit burials were identified in the same area, all dated to the Bronze Age, and the whole cluster appears to have been covered by roughly 40 centimetres of stony material consistent with a burial cairn, a mound of stones heaped over the dead. Centuries later, the site was overlaid again, this time by a rath, a type of enclosed farmstead typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, common across Ireland in the early medieval period. The effect is a kind of accidental stratigraphy: Bronze Age cremations beneath a cairn, all of it eventually absorbed beneath a settlement of an entirely different era, on a plateau that the boggy terrain around it would have kept largely inaccessible in between.