A cist, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a short stone-lined box grave, typically prehistoric, built from slabs to contain a single burial. This particular example left no mark on any Ordnance Survey map, has no visible trace on aerial imagery, and would be almost entirely unknown were it not for a single published account recorded at second hand.

The burial came to light sometime in the early 1850s, when uncles of the antiquarian T. J. Westropp disturbed the ground and found the cist. Westropp documented their discovery in a plan that was subsequently published in Wardell's 1904 work, where the cist appears as Site F. The location sits around 80 metres northwest of the Augustinian nunnery known as Monasternagalliaghduff, a medieval foundation in the Oldabbey area, and approximately 15 metres northeast of a separate burial ground. That the cist lay so close to both a monastic site and a later burial ground raises questions that the surviving record cannot answer: whether the burial predates the nunnery by centuries, or whether the clustering is coincidental, is simply not known. The crouched position of the skeleton is consistent with prehistoric burial practice, as is the inclusion of a vessel, though the clay dish itself has not been further described in the available notes.

The site lies within the formal grounds of Old Abbey House, which means access is not a matter of simply walking across open land. There is nothing to see at ground level; the 2015 Google Earth orthoimage confirms no surface trace remains. What the site offers, then, is not a visible monument but a point of orientation, a place to stand and consider how much of the archaeological record exists only because someone's uncles once turned a spade in a field, and a scholar thought it worth writing down.