The landowner, carrying out reclamation work on his fields, broke ground and found something ancient beneath it: two upright stone flags with a third laid flat across the top, forming a narrow box roughly 0.8 metres long and 0.5 metres wide, aligned east to west, open at either end. He described it in plain terms, as a working farmer might, and then the bulldozer moved on.

What he most likely encountered was a cist, a type of small stone-lined grave used in prehistoric Ireland, typically associated with the Bronze Age. Cists were usually built to contain a single crouched burial or a cremation deposit, sometimes accompanied by a pottery vessel. They are often found alone in fields, with no visible surface monument, which is precisely why so many have been lost to agriculture. The Kilcurrivard example, modest even by cist standards, fits the pattern well: no elaborate kerbing, no visible mound, just three flags and whatever lay between them. The absence of stones at the east and west ends is consistent with a simple form of the type. Whether any bones or grave goods were observed before the site was cleared is not recorded.