What made the find quietly arresting was the type of burial: lintel graves, a form of interment in which stone slabs are laid horizontally across the top of the grave to create a covered chamber, each one here measuring roughly two metres long and three-quarters of a metre wide. They had been sitting undisturbed about a metre below ground level, their presence entirely unsuspected until a spade went in.

The four burials were arranged in a loose cluster, three lying close together and a fourth positioned a few metres to the south. All were extended rather than crouched, and all were oriented west to east with the head placed to the west, a alignment strongly associated with early Christian burial practice in Ireland, where the dead were laid out to face the rising sun at the resurrection. The use of sea sand as the surrounding medium is a detail that speaks to the coastal character of this particular stretch of the Corca Dhuibhne peninsula, where the land and the shore have always been closely intertwined. No further contextual information about who these individuals were or precisely when they were buried appears to have survived alongside the physical remains.