In the summer of 1828, a local farmer mentioned to an Ordnance Survey of Ireland surveyor that he had stumbled across what he called an old cist some thirty-five years earlier, placing the original discovery around the early 1790s. A cist is a small stone-lined box grave, typically constructed to hold a single body, and this one was unusual in that it sat above ground rather than being sunk into the earth in the more conventional manner.

When the cist was opened it contained a crouched burial, the body folded into a foetal position in the way that was common practice among Bronze Age communities in Ireland, along with an earthenware vase. Grave goods of this kind, often referred to as food vessels or urns depending on their form, are characteristic of the earlier Bronze Age and suggest the burial may date to somewhere in the second millennium BC, though no more precise dating for this particular find is recorded. The farmer's account, relayed at a remove of several decades to a passing surveyor, is the only testimony that survived. No visible surface trace of the cist remains today, and the pastureland gives no indication that anything of the kind ever lay there at all.