What came to light was a cist, a small stone-lined burial box of the kind used across prehistoric Ireland and Britain to hold the remains of the dead, and this one turned out to be a remarkably well-preserved example of the type.

The cist was built from shale slabs arranged in a double row, set on edge and leaning slightly inwards so that the chamber narrowed towards the top, where it measured just 0.25 metres across beneath the capstone. Smaller packing-stones were wedged around the outside at the base to stabilise the whole structure. The floor was a single polygonal slab resting on firm yellow clay, and the capstone itself, measuring 0.91 metres by 0.79 metres and sitting at ground level, was not placed directly onto the side-stones but lifted slightly on a course of smaller stones between the two. Inside, at the centre of this carefully constructed space, excavators found a collared urn, a ceramic vessel with a distinctive raised collar or ridge near the rim, characteristic of the Early Bronze Age, inverted over a deposit of cremated bone. The remains represented at least one adult. Radiocarbon dating of the cremation placed the burial within a calibrated range of 2132 to 1889 BC, putting it firmly in the early second millennium before the common era, a period when cremation burial beneath or within small stone cists was a widely practised rite across Ireland.