Yet within that unassuming structure, archaeologists found the carefully arranged evidence of a society that had developed quite specific rituals around death, fire, and the marking of the dead. The site is now swallowed up by the infrastructure of the Southern Cross Motorway, which is, in a grim irony, the very reason it was ever investigated at all.

Test excavation carried out ahead of road construction, reported by Seaver and Keeley in 2003, revealed that the cairn was not simply a pile of stones. Possible concentric arrangements of cairn material were recorded, suggesting some deliberate organisation rather than casual accumulation. Beneath the cairn, a partially slab-lined pit held the cremated remains of a person in their mid-teens. At the centre of the mound lay a separate sub-rectangular pit containing scorched granite stones and fragments of burnt bone; this pit is thought to have functioned as the actual funeral pyre, with boards laid across the top and set alight. Cordoned urn fragments were recovered from the cairn material, along with a stone axe, two leaf-shaped arrowheads, a plano-convex knife, and hollow-scrapers. Cordoned urns are a ceramic form associated with the Irish Bronze Age, typically used in funerary contexts, and their presence here, alongside the worked flint and stone tools, points to a date and a community with established burial customs. The compilation of the site record was carried out by Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy.

As a physical destination, this site no longer exists in any accessible form; the motorway development that prompted its excavation has since overtaken the landscape around Laughanstown. What remains is the archaeological record itself, available through the sources that documented it. For anyone interested in Bronze Age Dublin, the significance of the find lies precisely in what the excavation captured before it was lost: a glimpse of a specific act of mourning, carried out for a teenager, in a field that is now tarmac.