The small, roughly circular mound at Kilcorney, measuring about nine metres by eight, had never been formally identified as an individual monument before machinery partially destroyed it. When skeletal material became visible in the exposed ground, the site was reported to Dúchas, the heritage body at the time, and a targeted excavation followed.

What the dig revealed was a place that different communities had returned to across a very long span of time. A cist is a stone-lined grave box, typically built during the prehistoric period, and the cairn itself, constructed from local limestone, fits that broad category. But the burial that drew attention was something else entirely. In the south-western quadrant sat a long cist, a type associated with Romano-British burial practice that appears in Ireland from around the fourth century AD, containing the fully extended skeleton of a young adult female. Her orientation, east-west with the head to the west, follows Early Christian convention. Infant bones were also found within the same cist, though scattered, probably by rodent activity over the intervening centuries. Prehistoric chert tools and a faceted quartz artefact recovered nearby suggest activity on the site even before the cairn was raised, possibly during the Bronze Age. A second long cist was identified on the northern side of the cairn, and evidence for a third, likely the primary burial and consistent with prehistoric cist types, was found at the centre. The picture that emerges is of an older monument quietly commandeered, generation after generation, by people who recognised it as a place where the dead belonged.