When archaeologists fully excavated the mound at Ballyeeskeen ahead of the construction work, they found, cut into its western summit, a small stone box built to hold the dead. The cist, a type of burial container made from flat slabs arranged on edge to form walls and covered by a single capstone, was just 0.45 metres long and 0.3 metres wide, barely large enough to accommodate what it held: the cremated bones of one adult, sex unknown. Three paved slabs formed the floor; each of the four sides was constructed from a double wall of small upright stones; and a single capstone, a metre long and just over 12 centimetres thick, sealed the whole thing shut.

What makes the burial quietly arresting is the layering of human decisions it represents. The barrow itself, an earthen or stone mound raised over earlier remains, was already an established feature in the landscape when someone chose to reopen it. The cist was a secondary insertion, meaning a later community dug into the existing mound and added their own dead to it, treating the site as a place already weighted with meaning. A second cremation burial, placed in a simple pit rather than a cist, was inserted into the eastern side of the barrow, suggesting the mound was returned to more than once as a focus for mortuary activity. The only object recovered alongside the cremated bones in the cist was a waste flake of chert, a fragment produced when knapping flint-like stone into tools, its presence perhaps incidental, perhaps deliberate. Danaher published the findings in 1964, the year following the excavation.