Yet beneath its stone kerb, which still defines a circle roughly 13.7 metres across, four stone-lined cists, the small box-like graves used for individual or small-group burials in prehistoric Ireland, were stacked with the evidence of a community using this ground repeatedly over centuries.

The site was excavated by O'Kelly in 1952, who found the cairn built over a layer of old, compacted turf and enclosed by large kerbstones laid on edge, the largest measuring roughly nine feet by three feet nine inches. The central cist, its floor laid in what O'Kelly described as a crazy-paving fashion and its roof a single capstone over eight feet long, held the remains of a man and woman whose inhumation had later been disturbed by the insertion of a cremated young person. A second cist nearby contained a fragmentary adult; a fourth held the remains of a man, a woman, and a child. A third cist, the smallest, contained no burial at all. Scattered through the cairn material were fragments of Food Vessel pottery with Beaker-type ornament, broken saddle-querns, an axe hammer, a bone point, and an antler pendant. Beneath the old turf layer, close to the second cist, lay shallow pits, charcoal spreads, flint tools, two pieces of quartz crystal, and fragments of a human skull. O'Kelly also identified a fosse, a shallow encircling ditch, running outside the kerb but not concentrically with it, and he believed this ring barrow predated the cairn itself. Later reinterpretation by Brindley and colleagues in 1987 and 1988, drawing on radiocarbon dates placing the primary inhumation at roughly 2260 to 2140 cal. BC and the charcoal layer somewhat earlier at 2560 to 2390 cal. BC, suggested a more layered sequence: a short-term settlement associated with Beaker and non-Beaker pottery, followed by the construction of the multiple-cist cairn in the earliest Bronze Age, and finally the addition of the enclosing fosse and secondary burials. Pottery O'Kelly had originally classified as Neolithic was reassigned to these Bronze Age traditions. Two unclassified megalithic tombs lie within roughly 600 metres to the west and 300 metres to the east, suggesting this stretch of north Cork was a place people returned to, and marked, across a long span of prehistoric time.