When the great standing stone at Punchestown in County Kildare was being prepared for re-erection in 1934, workers uncovered something small and quietly puzzling beside it: a cist, the ancient burial type consisting of a stone-lined box set into the ground, tucked against the south-western end of the old socket hole where the monolith had lain fallen. It was very small and roughly formed, packed with compacted clay, and when examined it yielded a single pig heel bone. That bone was judged to be a modern intrusion rather than any deliberate prehistoric deposit, which leaves the cist itself without a clear explanation.

The stone it accompanied is one of the tallest standing stones in Ireland, and its collapse at some unknown point before the twentieth century had left the socket exposed long enough for whatever sequence of events produced this odd little structure. When the decision was made to re-erect the monolith in 1934, a new and more secure socket had to be cut to hold it safely upright. That engineering necessity meant the cist could not be left where it lay; it was disturbed and lost rather than preserved. Whether it was prehistoric in origin, a later folk deposit made near a prominent landmark, or something else entirely, the evidence was too slight and the bone too ambiguous to settle the question. The discovery was recorded by Leask in 1937, and the site has been noted by several scholars since, but the cist itself exists now only in those references.