The gold took the form of corrugated or embossed plates, connected to one another with wire, and alongside the bones lay amber beads. Almost everything was immediately melted down, which was the common fate of ancient metalwork stumbled upon by labourers who had no framework for understanding what they had found and every reason to value the raw material. Only a single plate survived.

That surviving piece eventually made its way to the National Museum of Ireland, and it turns out to be genuinely puzzling. A scholar writing in 1980 described it as an "interesting trapezoid," noting that it is riddled with small holes suggesting it was once wired to something larger, and that its decoration of chevrons points toward what archaeologists call the Food Vessel period, meaning the Early Bronze Age, roughly 2000 to 1500 BC. Food Vessel is a term drawn from a style of pottery commonly placed in burials of that era, and the broader culture associated with it often produced elaborate gold ornaments as grave goods. The Knockane piece, then, is a fragment of something that was once far more elaborate, a burial covering or pectoral of a kind rarely documented in Irish archaeology, and one that almost entirely ceased to exist within hours of its discovery. A published account from 1858 records the find in detail, drawing on Crocker's earlier illustration of 1824, which suggests at least one person thought to sketch the material before too much of it was gone. The site itself, close to what Fitzgerald described as the coach road near Ballindinasgate, was noted on an Ordnance Survey map of 1935 as containing caves, and the surrounding area holds several prehistoric burial mounds, giving the landscape a density of Early Bronze Age activity that makes the 1805 discovery feel less like an anomaly and more like one piece of a largely unread record.