In 1949, erosion or earthworks exposed a prehistoric cist burial, a type of stone-lined box grave constructed from large slabs, sitting only about thirty centimetres below the surface. It was a careful piece of ancient engineering: four upright slabs formed the rectangular walls, a substantial capstone measuring roughly one and a half metres long rested across them on a bed of flat stones, and the floor was neatly paved with small square slabs. The whole structure was aligned north to south, a detail that may carry significance in terms of prehistoric funerary tradition, though the precise meaning of such orientations is still debated by archaeologists.

The cist measured approximately 1.5 metres in length, 0.53 metres wide, and 0.61 metres deep, proportions that place it in the category of a long cist, associated broadly with the Bronze Age in Ireland. Whoever was buried here had been cremated, and fragments of burnt bone scattered around the structure were identified as belonging to a single adult male. The circumstances of discovery were not ideal for archaeology. By the time the National Museum came to investigate, someone had already dug the cist out, and no artefacts were recovered. A memo from the period tantalisingly mentions a decorated stone connected with the find, but no further detail appears to have survived, leaving that detail as an unanswered question attached to an otherwise reasonably well-documented site. The find is recorded in Cahill and Sikora's 2011 study of Irish Bronze Age cremation practices, which places it within a broader pattern of riverbank and lowland cist burials across the country.