No mound, no stone, no visible mark of any kind. Yet beneath the surface, or rather beneath what was once the surface, a Bronze Age community had placed their dead with considerable care into a box of limestone slabs barely large enough to hold them. That box, a short cist measuring just over a metre in length and less than half a metre high, held at least three individuals: the crouched skeletal remains of an adolescent female adult, a cremation representing an adult female, and an adolescent, along with fragments of a child's skull. The word cist comes from the Greek for box, and that is exactly what these graves were, tight stone-lined chambers, usually slab-built, associated with Bronze Age burial practice across Ireland and Britain.

The cist came to light in 1931 during sand quarrying in an esker, one of the long sinuous ridges of gravel and sand deposited by meltwater streams running beneath glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age. Eskers were prized in later centuries for road-building material, which is precisely why this one was being dug into. The five limestone slabs had been set on edge and aligned northeast to southwest, with a single slab forming three of the four sides and two thinner parallel slabs closing the western end. Inside, alongside the human remains, were an inverted vase, two flint scrapers, and those skull fragments of a child. The inverted vase is a detail worth pausing on; vessels placed upside-down in cist burials appear elsewhere in the Irish Bronze Age record, possibly as containers for offerings or as deliberate ritual gestures. A separate cist may have been uncovered nearby as early as 1929, suggesting this was not an isolated burial but part of a small funerary landscape now almost entirely erased.