At Kilmichael in County Wexford, that is more or less what happened, until erosion brought the grave to light by exposing its side-stones roughly one and a half metres below the surface of the cliff.

The structure is a cist, a type of prehistoric stone-lined box grave typically built to hold a single crouched burial. This one is rectangular, with a clay base and no surviving capstone to close it at the top. When Patrick Power and a group of local enthusiasts excavated the site in 2001, the skeletal remains one would expect to find had vanished entirely, almost certainly dissolved or carried off by water over a very long period. What did survive was a ribbed food vessel bowl, a style of ceramic associated with Early Bronze Age burials in Ireland and Britain, and a small collection of lithics, worked stone objects. The food vessel is particularly telling: these pots were placed with the dead as grave goods, possibly containing food or drink for an afterlife journey, and their ribbed decoration is a recognisable feature of the tradition. The absence of bone does not diminish the find. It simply shifts the evidence from the biological to the material, and the pot alone is enough to place a person, and a moment of mourning, at this clifftop sometime in the earlier second millennium BC.