That accidental discovery in 1985 exposed a cist, which is a small stone-lined burial box formed by setting slabs on edge to create walls, with flat stones laid as a floor and a roof. What emerged from the earth at Rathcahill West was remarkably compact: the entire chamber measured just 50 centimetres at its longest, 40 centimetres wide, and 35 centimetres deep, yet it had served as the final resting place for the cremated remains of two people.

Inspection by National Museum of Ireland staff, documented by Kelly in 1987, confirmed the grave held the burnt bones of two adult males, one of whom may have been of advanced age at the time of death. Roughly seven metres to the south-west of the cist, investigators also recorded a circular area of burning measuring one and a half metres in diameter and a metre in depth, interpreted as the likely site of the funeral pyre where the bodies were cremated before the remains were gathered and placed in the grave. The sequence, cremation followed by interment of the collected bones in a stone-lined cist, is a practice associated with prehistoric burial traditions in Ireland, though the precise period to which this particular example belongs is not recorded in the available sources. A fuller account of the site was later published by Cahill and Sikora in their 2011 volume, Breaking Ground, Finding Graves, which compiled reports on National Museum excavations of burials carried out between 1927 and 2006.

The cist itself is no longer at Rathcahill West. After the discovery the stones were carefully removed and the grave was reconstructed inside Newcastle West Community Centre, where it can be seen today. Newcastle West is a reasonably sized market town in west Limerick, straightforward to reach by road, and the community centre setting means the reconstructed cist is accessible without any fieldwork or countryside navigation. Visitors should be aware they are looking at a deliberate reconstruction rather than the in-situ monument, but the original stones are present, and the scale of the thing, barely the size of a small chest, tends to prompt quiet reflection on whoever judged it sufficient for the dead.