The cairn at Kilcorney, roughly circular and measuring nine metres by eight, had gone unrecognised as an individual monument until that accidental disturbance brought a cist grave, and the skeletal remains inside it, into the open.

The cairn itself is built from local limestone and would, on appearance alone, be read as prehistoric. But what the excavation, published by Grant in 2006, revealed was a layered history that spans an extraordinary range of time. The most recently placed burial, a long cist of a type consistent with Romano-British practice recorded in Ireland from the fourth century AD onwards, was found in the south-western quadrant. A cist, in this context, is a box-like grave lined and covered with flat stones. This one held the fully extended skeleton of a young adult female, her head oriented to the west, a practice associated with Early Christian burial. Within the same cist, the scattered bones of a young infant were also found, likely disturbed by rodent activity. Separate from this, a second long cist was identified on the north side of the cairn, and evidence for a third survives in the central area, which is thought to be the primary burial and of a type more consistent with prehistoric funerary practice. Chert lithics and a faceted quartz artefact recovered from the disturbed northern area point to human activity that may even predate the construction of the cairn itself, possibly reaching back to the Bronze Age. The site, in other words, is not one burial but a sequence of them, accumulated across millennia, each generation apparently drawn to the same small mound of stone.