The feature was spotted during pre-construction survey work ahead of a wind farm development near Kilgarvan, and what initially registered as a modest, irregular heap measuring roughly three metres across and barely thirty centimetres high proved, once excavated, to be the eroded upper layer of a Bronze Age burial cairn. Beneath that unremarkable surface, the full cairn extended to 7.5 metres in one direction and 6.3 metres in the other, with a maximum height of 0.80 metres, its stones a mixture of sub-rounded sandstones, occasional shale, and rare quartz pebbles.

At the centre of the cairn, excavator David Murphy uncovered a short cist, the type of small stone-lined grave box common to the earlier Bronze Age in Ireland, in which a body was typically placed in a crouched position. This one was built from four thin reddish-grey sandstone slabs set on edge, capped with two overlapping sandstone lids, and carefully packed into a prepared base of clayey silt and angular stones to keep the whole structure upright and stable. The internal space was roughly 49 centimetres by 39 centimetres, small enough to raise the possibility that it was dug for a child. No bone survived, which is not surprising given the wet, acidic, peaty soil and the slightly sloping ground that would have channelled water through the cairn over millennia. The only object recovered was a small thumbnail scraper, a type of flint tool whose parallels across Ireland place it somewhere between the Later Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age. Beyond the cist itself, the south and south-eastern portion of the cairn overlay a carefully laid stone surface, roughly 9.5 metres by 6.1 metres, with flat faces turned upwards. It appears to predate, or to be broadly contemporary with, the cairn's outer layers, and the fact that it approaches the cist from the southeast has led to the suggestion that it may have served as a platform or gathering space for whatever rituals accompanied the burial. The sequence in which these elements were laid down could not be fully resolved, but the evidence points strongly to a single, concentrated episode of construction and ceremony.