A cist, in archaeological terms, is exactly that: a coffin-like container built from upright slabs and sealed with a capstone, used during the Bronze Age to inter the dead. This one, when it was opened, held the cremated remains of two people, an adult male and an infant, sharing a space less than sixty centimetres long and twenty-two centimetres wide. Alongside them was a single oval perforated stone pendant, the kind of object that raises more questions than it answers.

The cist was excavated in 1933 by the Second Harvard Archaeological Expedition, under the direction of Hallam Movius, whose subsequent report documented both this burial and a second, larger cist located just five centimetres to the south. The two were so close together that the massive capstone of the larger cist partly overlapped the capstone of the smaller one. This smaller cist was constructed from four limestone uprights, one slab per wall, packed with smaller stones to hold everything in position, and roofed with a single capstone roughly seventy-nine centimetres long and only six centimetres thick. The whole structure sat just over a third of a metre below ground level, its floor nothing more than gravel subsoil. The capstone had held. The cremated bones filled the chamber to roughly half its depth, the two individuals interred together in a space that would have felt, even in prehistory, deliberately compact.

The hill itself is unremarkable to the eye, a gentle rise in pasture with low-lying damp ground falling away to the north and Lough Carrowcon lying roughly five hundred and forty metres to the north-east. The pairing of the two cists on the same hilltop, positioned so closely that their capstones touched, suggests this was a chosen place, used more than once and perhaps understood as already significant when the second burial was made.