In a field of improved pasture on a south-west-facing slope in Killoveeny, County Mayo, there is nothing to see at ground level, no stone, no hollow, no trace of any kind. Yet local knowledge recorded in 1990 points to this ordinary-looking hillside as the former site of a cist or boulder burial, a prehistoric interment in which a body, often accompanied by grave goods, was placed within a stone-lined pit or beneath a large surface boulder. These were among the most common burial forms of the Bronze Age in Ireland, and their presence on a slope with a south-westerly aspect is not unusual; such orientations appear repeatedly in the siting of prehistoric monuments across the country.

The burial, if that is what it was, did not survive agricultural improvement. Land reclamation, which in an Irish upland context typically involves drainage, ploughing, and the clearance of surface stone, is one of the most significant causes of monument loss in the archaeological record. Once a cist is disturbed, the covering boulders scattered or broken, and the pit itself turned over by machinery, very little remains to indicate that anything was ever there. The site at Killoveeny appears to have been lost in precisely this way, leaving only the memory of it in local testimony.