A cist is essentially a short coffin of upright slabs, roofed with a capstone and set into the ground, often containing a crouched burial and occasionally a ceramic vessel left as an offering. They are found across Ireland in their thousands, quiet and mostly unremarked, but the fact that one is recorded at Keel places this particular corner of Achill within a continuum of prehistoric settlement stretching back well over three thousand years.

Unfortunately, the available record for this specific monument is sparse, and little can be said with confidence about when it was found, by whom, or what condition it is currently in. What can be said is that Achill and the broader Erris and Corraun peninsulas of Mayo preserve an unusually dense concentration of prehistoric remains, a consequence partly of the landscape's relative isolation and partly of the thin soils that were never deeply disturbed by later agriculture. Cists in this region have in other cases yielded Food Vessel pottery and unburnt inhumations typical of the earlier Bronze Age, roughly 2200 to 1500 BC, though nothing specific is documented here to confirm that pattern at Keel.