The grave that once housed them, a carefully constructed stone cist, a prehistoric box-like burial chamber built from upright slabs with a single large capstone laid across the top, was fed through a stone crusher sometime around 1946. Its contents, possibly including a ceramic pot and a scattering of sea-shells, went with it. Only the skeleton was spared that particular fate.

The discovery came about almost accidentally. Workers quarrying gravel from a natural ridge in the Carrowmore townland noticed a small slab, roughly 76 centimetres square, protruding in the working face at a depth of around 2.44 metres below the surface. Further digging exposed the cist proper, a substantial structure approximately 2.13 metres long, aligned roughly east to west, with its floor laid on a single large paving slab and its sides formed from contiguous upright slabs. Inside lay an extended skeleton on its back, head to the west, arms at its sides. Fearing that the find might halt work on the site, the workers made a swift decision. The grave goods went through the crusher; the bones were gathered up and reburied somewhere nearby. The quarrying continued. M. A. Timoney published an account of the event in the late 1960s, drawing on the recollections of six people who had been present, though their memories did not entirely agree, partly owing to the passage of more than twenty-five years, and partly, as Timoney noted, owing to fear of the consequences of what had been done. Even the location of the cist remained in dispute. Timoney's original coordinates placed it near the Carrowmore and Graigue townland boundary, but a subsequent communication from Timoney in 2022 suggested the actual find spot was more likely around 200 metres to the north-east, near the south-east corner of a field whose walls were removed by the Office of Public Works during the reconstruction of the nearby megalithic monument known as Carrowmore 51.

Carrowmore itself is one of the largest concentrations of megalithic tombs in Ireland, so the presence of a prehistoric burial in the surrounding landscape is not surprising. What makes this particular grave notable is not what survives, since nothing above ground does, but the paper trail of imperfect memory, belated documentation, and shifting coordinates that now constitutes its entire record.