The box, a type of prehistoric grave known as a cist, measured just 0.9 metres long, 0.45 metres wide, and 0.5 metres high: a careful, deliberate construction of upright slabs with a cobbled floor and a single capstone laid across the top. He was placed inside in a crouched position, lying on his left side with his head pointing towards the north-east, a posture common in Bronze Age burials across Ireland and Britain, thought by some researchers to reflect beliefs about sleep, rebirth, or the direction of the rising sun. He lay there, sealed and largely undisturbed, for somewhere in the order of three or four thousand years.

The grave came to light in 1934, not through any planned excavation but through quarrying of the hillock. The find was subsequently documented by Shea, writing in 1936, and later referenced by the archaeologist John Waddell in his surveys of Irish Bronze Age burial practice. A cist of this kind would originally have been dug into the ground and covered over, the mound of gravel above it serving as both marker and protection. The quarrying that revealed it was also, inevitably, the quarrying that began to erase it. What the site amounts to now is modest: a slight hollow in the ground and a few narrow flagstones, the last physical traces of a structure that once enclosed a human life in its entirety.