The burial had lain undisturbed, in all likelihood for several thousand years, until a mechanical expansion of a sand quarry brought it to the surface. That the grave survived at all is something of a small accident of geology and timing.

A cist, in the archaeological sense, is a box-like burial chamber built from stone slabs, typically just large enough to contain a single body placed in a contracted or foetal position. The Morenane example was five-sided and composed of seven large stones, sealed by a substantial capstone. Its interior measured roughly 1.12 metres by 82 centimetres, and it was approximately 67 centimetres deep. What distinguishes it from a more standard short cist is the particular care taken in its construction: the side stones did not lean inward as was common in the type, and the gaps between them had been deliberately filled with thin slivers of stone. The floor was paved. Writing in 1974, Raftery suggested it might represent a Linkardstown-type burial, a Neolithic tradition of elaborate single-grave interment found across the Irish midlands. Ryan, reassessing the evidence in 1981, disagreed, concluding instead that the tomb is almost certainly to be regarded as a slightly unusual Early Bronze Age short cist, placing it somewhere in the broad span of the earlier second millennium BC. A fuller account of the find was later published by Cahill and Sikora in the National Museum of Ireland's 2011 survey of burial excavations, covering discoveries made between 1927 and 2006.

The area where the cist was found is now a disused sand quarry, which means there is nothing to visit in any conventional sense. The burial itself has long since been removed and recorded, and the landscape has been thoroughly altered by the quarrying that first uncovered it. The interest here lies less in the site as a physical destination and more in what the discovery represents: a glimpse, however fragmentary, of a Bronze Age community in the Limerick countryside that took considerable trouble over the burial of one of its young.