One was tiny, barely eighteen inches long, the burial of a child. The other, three feet in length, held the remains of an adult man. Both were what archaeologists call cist burials, a form of prehistoric interment in which a grave is carefully constructed from flat slabs laid at the bottom and sides, forming a neat stone box around the dead. Inside each cist lay an earthen vessel of baked clay, and the bones had not been burnt, distinguishing these from the cremation burials more commonly associated with the Bronze Age. The pottery did not survive intact; according to a contemporary account recorded in the Ordnance Survey Letters of 1839, it was broken by the carelessness of the diggers.

The account comes from the Revd. W.K. Boroughs, as relayed in the OS Letters, and it places these finds within a large enclosure at Duninga, itself positioned at the eastern end of a linear earthwork known as the Rathduff Trench, a roughly east-west running bank or ditch that sits immediately outside the northern quadrant of the enclosure. Reverend Boroughs noted that the fort appeared to have formed one of a chain of such monuments, suggesting it once marked or enforced a boundary between two significant ancient territories. That interpretation sits comfortably with the physical evidence: the county boundary between Kilkenny and Carlow still runs through this landscape, possibly preserving, at least in outline, a division of much older origin. The enclosure and its burials were not the only things to suffer over time; by 2008 the monument had also been quarried into for gravel, a fate that has diminished many earthworks across the Irish midlands.