That is more or less what happened at Áth An Charbaill in October 1979, when a slab-lined pit was uncovered close to the carved stone at Aghacarrible, and investigators found themselves looking at a burial that did not quite fit the expected form.

A cist is a prehistoric grave type in which flat stone slabs are arranged to form a box-like chamber around a body or cremated remains. What Ryan of the National Museum of Ireland examined here was something slightly different: a narrow rectangular pit, 2.1 metres long at the top of its lining slabs and 1.7 metres at the base, with the slabs leaning inward against the pit walls rather than standing upright and firmly bedded. Five capstones remained in place; two had already fallen inward. The floor was unpaved and the ground plan at the bottom was irregular. Heavy autumn rain had filled the pit almost to its brim with mud by the time it was examined, and it was within that muddy fill, resting on the subsoil, that a portion of a human cranium was recovered. Age and sex could not be determined. The bone was accessioned into the National Museum's collection as 1979:102. At the south-western end, some distance away, two elongated stones appeared to be deliberately set into the ground, though their precise relationship to the grave was unclear. The site may belong to a wider cluster: a 1931 account by O'Sullivan had already noted several cists containing fragments of human bone in a field adjoining the decorated Aghacarrible stone, suggesting this corner of the Dingle Peninsula held more burials than any single discovery could account for.