Just beneath the surface, on the northern slope of a low rise, they uncovered a short cist, a type of small stone-lined burial box used in prehistoric Ireland, measuring roughly one metre in length and half a metre wide. What made the find immediately arresting was not just its age but its contents: unburnt, disarticulated human bones lying directly on a floor of fine grey sandy gravel, with no pottery, no grave goods, nothing else at all.

The cist itself was carefully, if simply, constructed. Trapezoidal in plan and slightly wider at its eastern end, it was formed from four side-stones set on edge and leaning inwards, with a series of packing-stones of varying sizes placed horizontally across their tops. A large triangular slab rested on these packing-stones to form the covering. The absence of any accompanying objects makes precise dating difficult, but the form of the structure is consistent with early Bronze Age burial practice, placing its construction somewhere in the broad period between roughly 2500 and 1500 BC. The bones being disarticulated suggests the remains may have been moved or disturbed before or during interment, though the circumstances are now impossible to recover. Cahill and Sikora, writing in 2011, recorded the find in detail, drawing on what the ground itself had preserved across several millennia of quiet fieldwork by the River Dinin.