When workers began quarrying a low, grass-covered mound at Corrower for sand and stone, they broke into something far older, exposing a cremated burial alongside a ceramic food vessel, the kind of small decorated pot routinely placed with the Bronze Age dead. More burials came to light two years later, and by the time the National Museum stepped in to excavate what remained, roughly half the site had already been disturbed or destroyed.

What the excavation pieced together was a compact but carefully arranged Bronze Age cemetery. The barrow measured approximately thirteen metres in diameter and stood about a metre high, built up from a circular mound of brown sandy soil. Positioned slightly north of centre, and sitting on top of that mound, was a cairn of stones defined by a U-shaped arrangement of kerb stones. Beneath the whole structure, dug into or built directly onto the underlying subsoil, were nine graves, a mixture of simple pits and cists. A cist is a small stone-lined box grave, typically just large enough to hold a burial deposit. Together, those nine graves held the cremated remains of thirteen, possibly fourteen individuals, among them two children. Gender could not be determined from the remains. Five of the graves contained food vessel pots placed alongside the cremations. Crucially, the evidence pointed to a single depositional event: all the dead appear to have been buried at the same time, the mound then raised over them as one collective act. The excavator, reporting in 1960, interpreted this as a Bronze Age cemetery, a community of the dead gathered together and sealed beneath a single monument.