The burial was covered with corrugated or embossed gold plates joined together by wire, and beside the remains lay a number of amber beads. It is the kind of discovery that sounds almost too extraordinary to be credible, and in one important respect the story ends badly: almost all of the gold was melted down shortly after its discovery, presumably sold for its material value with no thought for what it represented.

The one surviving piece, a single plate now held in the National Museum of Ireland, was recorded by Crocker in 1824 and later by Day in 1899. A twentieth-century assessment described it as a trapezoid shape riddled with small holes suggesting it had once been wired to something larger. Its decoration of chevron patterns points towards the Food Vessel period, a phase of the Early Bronze Age, roughly the second millennium BC, when pottery and metalwork of considerable sophistication were being produced across Ireland and Britain. The burial itself was found near the coach road at Knockane, close to a place referred to as Ballindinasgate. This detail comes from a mid-nineteenth-century account by Fitzgerald, writing more than fifty years after the event, by which point much of the physical evidence had long since disappeared. An Ordnance Survey map from 1935 marks caves in the area Fitzgerald identified, and the surrounding landscape contains several prehistoric burial mounds, which suggests this was not an isolated interment but part of a broader funerary landscape used over a long period.

The gold shroud, or what little remains of it, is the only tangible trace of what must have been an unusually elaborate burial. Whether the individual interred was a person of particular status, or whether the gold wrapping reflected a ritual practice more widespread than the surviving evidence suggests, cannot now be answered. The quarryman's find has left one small, perforated trapezoid in a museum collection and a great deal of uncertainty about everything else.