A cist, aligned northwest to southeast, came to light in the earth beneath the construction work. A cist is a small stone-lined grave, typically associated with prehistoric burial practice, in which a body or cremated remains were placed in a box-like chamber formed from flat slabs. Finding one beneath a later Christian graveyard is not unusual in Ireland, where sacred ground has often been reused across long stretches of time, but the discovery does offer a glimpse of how layered the landscape around Inishkeen really is.

The find was recorded by Reade in 1855, shortly after it was uncovered, which places the discovery firmly in that mid-Victorian period when antiquarian interest in Irish field monuments was running high. The orientation of the cist, northwest to southeast, is a detail worth noting; prehistoric burials were often aligned with the movement of the sun or with local topographical features, though the precise reasoning behind any individual cist's alignment is rarely recoverable. The church it was found beneath still stands in the graveyard at Inishkeen, a townland in County Monaghan that carries its own considerable historical weight as the birthplace of the poet Patrick Kavanagh.