The grave itself is modest in scale, barely a metre in any direction, constructed without a floor slab; instead, its sidestones and endstones were propped from beneath by smaller supporting stones, with two overlapping capstones sealing it from above. What makes it quietly arresting is not its size but its position: it was set into a deliberately dug pit cut into the top of an already ancient cairn, a large mound of stones that had accumulated its own long history of burial before these later interments were added.

The grave, catalogued as Grave 2 in the schema devised by Hugh O'Neill Hencken, was excavated during the 1930s as part of the Third Harvard Archaeological Expedition in Ireland. A cist, to briefly explain the term, is a type of small stone box burial common in Bronze Age Ireland, typically constructed from flat slabs arranged to enclose a body or cremated remains. Hencken, who subsequently restored the cairn after excavation, found a flint end-scraper and a bone point in the cairn material directly beneath the cist. He and his colleague Movius interpreted these as burial offerings that had gradually washed downward through the mound over time. The cist itself yielded no material suitable for radiocarbon dating, but a second cist found roughly 1.5 metres to the north, within the same pit and almost certainly from the same period of use, was later dated to somewhere between approximately 1610 and 1432 cal BC. This places Grave 2 within a final phase of mortuary activity at Poulawack, when at least two other graves were also added to the cairn's summit, each inserted into a mound whose earlier layers already contained centuries of the dead.