Beneath it lay a cist, a small stone-lined burial box barely a metre across, containing two ceramic food vessels and a quantity of cremated human bone. The vessels, known as food vessels, are a type of pottery commonly placed with the dead during the Bronze Age in Ireland, thought to accompany the deceased into the afterlife. What made the discovery stranger still was where the cist sat: tucked into the south-western corner of a rath, a ringfort of the early medieval period, meaning a later community had built their enclosure directly over a far older burial ground, perhaps without knowing it was there.

The cist came to light in 1935, when a local man noticed the covering slab and investigated. The cremated remains inside were subsequently analysed and identified as belonging to at least two adults and a child. The finds were sent to the National Museum of Ireland. Later excavation work, published by Ó Ríordáin and Mac Dermott in 1950 to 1951, established that the cist predated the construction of the rath above it, placing the burial firmly in the Bronze Age and the ringfort in a much later phase of occupation on the same ground. The excavation also revealed that this was not an isolated grave. Nearby, archaeologists identified a possible burial cairn, two further cists, and two pit burials, all apparently dating to the same Bronze Age period, suggesting the plateau had once served as a significant funerary landscape before it was repurposed by early medieval settlement.