The grave in question is a cist burial, a small stone-lined box sealed with capstones, a form of interment common in Bronze Age Ireland. When archaeologists opened it, they found a Food Vessel, the type of decorated ceramic pot typically placed with the dead during this period, still intact and surrounded by burnt bone. The vessel carried simple incised decoration and the whole arrangement suggested a date somewhere between 2000 and 1500 BC.

The site came to light between September 1990 and January 1991, when remote sensing and trial trenching was carried out at the ringfort at Dunbell Big. As well as the cist, excavators found a second, older burial just 0.4 metres to the north: a pit-burial containing a crushed Food Vessel, also associated with burnt bone. Cassidy, reporting on the work, noted that the intact Food Vessel from the cist may belong to a slightly more recent era than its crushed neighbour, suggesting two separate burial events in close proximity. The cist itself was described as well-built, its fill a reddish loam. That an early medieval house was later constructed directly over this spot, apparently without awareness of what lay beneath, gives the site a quiet accidental quality, one burial tradition unknowingly overlying another across a gap of perhaps a thousand years.