He found three. The largest cist, a stone-lined burial box measuring eight feet square, held large quantities of human bones. A smaller stone chest contained two complete human skeletons, and a third, just eighteen inches square, was packed with slack lime. The cists themselves were broken up in the process, but the bones, to the farmer's credit, were replaced in their original positions rather than simply discarded.

The account comes down to us through a brief note by Fitzgerald, writing in 1858, and a sketch and description recorded by Windele and later published by Borlase in 1897. A cist, in this context, is a prehistoric burial chamber made from flat stone slabs, typically associated with Bronze Age funerary practice. The mound that once covered these chambers was a tumulus, an earthen barrow raised over the dead, and its position atop a natural hillock would have made it visible across the surrounding landscape. What makes the site stranger still is that it was not alone. Two further tumuli survive in the same townland of Ballyvorisheen, one roughly 150 metres to the north-east in the same field, and another about 350 metres to the south-west. The deliberate clustering of burial mounds in a single area suggests this corner of County Cork was, at some point in prehistory, a place set apart for the dead.