The cist at Bealick, a type of burial common in prehistoric Ireland and Britain in which a body or cremated remains were placed in a box-shaped pit lined with upright stone slabs and covered with a capstone, measures roughly half a metre long and not quite half a metre deep. It is a modest container for a human life. What makes it stranger still is that after excavation it was reconstructed slightly forward of its original position, so the covering slab visible today is a deliberate re-presentation rather than an untouched survival.

The site was first recorded on the 1938 Ordnance Survey six-inch map simply as "Ancient Burial (site of)", a designation that tells you almost nothing. The archaeologist Bertram Windle had examined it earlier, in 1912, finding fragments of an encrusted urn, a food vessel, and human bones. Encrusted urns are a Bronze Age ceramic tradition in which narrow bands of clay are applied to the surface of the pot before firing and then decorated, in this case with incised herring-bone lines, giving the vessel a distinctive textured appearance. A food vessel is a smaller, often more finely made pot associated with burial ritual during the same period. Michael J. O'Kelly excavated the site in 1944, recovering further fragments of both vessels along with a small quantity of finely comminuted cremated bone, meaning bone reduced to very fine particles through burning. The encrusted urn stood 0.27 metres tall with a rim diameter of 0.31 metres; about a third of the food vessel survived, mainly red-brown in colour and decorated with oblique lightly-scored lines in a broad herring-bone pattern, with decoration continuing inside the rim. Windle's analysis of the bones suggested the burial was that of a female.

The reconstructed cist sits above ground, and the covering slab, approximately 0.91 metres square, can still be seen. It is an odd thing to encounter: not a grand megalithic monument but a small, carefully made stone box, put back together and placed just slightly out of place, a few centimetres forward from where it held its occupant for several thousand years.