What they uncovered instead was an ox, placed with apparent deliberateness at the heart of a cairn that the local community had long called 'The Moat'. Animal burials of this kind are unusual enough to raise questions that prehistory rarely answers cleanly, and this one has lingered in the record as a quietly perplexing find.

The mound came to light properly in 1963, when road-widening works on the N59 Sligo-Ballina road made excavation necessary. Before it was opened, it presented as a gently domed circular mound roughly 13.5 metres in diameter and 2.3 metres high, with a slightly steeper profile on its western and northern faces. Beneath the outer layer of stony soil, excavators found a cairn, a structured heap of stones and gravel roughly 11.85 metres across and 1.5 metres high, edged at the south-west and north-east by a kerb-like setting of stones. There was no fosse, the encircling ditch that often accompanies burial mounds of this type. The ox lay unburnt and unprotected just north-west of the cairn's centre, fractionally above the old ground surface, accompanied by twelve poorly-preserved pottery sherds and a waste fragment of chert, a flint-like stone used in tool-making. Scattered through the lower cairn material were further unburnt animal bones, from calf, pig, and ox. At some later point, the mound was reused for human burial: a cist, a small stone-lined grave box, was inserted into the western summit, and a pit-burial was cut into the eastern side. Both contained cremated remains, suggesting the site retained some significance across more than one phase of prehistoric activity.

The excavation was published by Danaher in 1964, and remains one of the more curious examples of prehistoric funerary practice recorded in the west of Ireland, not for what was found in abundance, but for what was chosen, deliberately it seems, to lie at the centre of all that careful construction.