The stone, nearly thirty centimetres thick, had been serving as a capstone for a cist, the kind of small, box-shaped grave typical of the Bronze Age in Ireland, formed from upright slabs set into the ground and designed to hold the remains of the dead in a compact, protected space.

Lifting the capstone revealed a rectangular chamber roughly eighty centimetres east to west and fifty centimetres north to south, its floor lined with small flat stones and its walls formed by four upright slabs. The whole construction had been set into a slightly larger pit, about one and a half metres by one metre, packed with a stony fill. Inside the cist, excavators found a substantial quantity of cremated bone, and analysis established that the remains belonged to four separate individuals. The discovery was reported in The Corkman newspaper in April 1977. That four people should share such a small stone box, whether deposited at the same time or accumulated over generations, raises questions the available evidence cannot fully answer, though communal or family cist burials are known elsewhere in prehistoric Ireland.