A plough turning a field near Timolin in County Kildare in 1981 struck something that had been undisturbed for roughly four thousand years: a small stone box, barely the size of a large suitcase, containing the remains of a Bronze Age man. The find was entirely accidental, and that accidental quality is part of what makes it worth pausing over. Across Ireland, it is often the disruption of ordinary agricultural work rather than any planned excavation that brings the prehistoric dead back into view.

The structure itself is a cist, a type of burial common in the Early Bronze Age, typically consisting of flat stone slabs arranged on edge to form a box, then sealed with a capstone. This particular example measured roughly 0.75 metres along its longest axis and stood 0.44 metres high, covered by a large suboval capstone measuring 1.6 metres by 1.15 metres. Inside were the disarticulated bones of an adult male, meaning the skeleton was no longer in its original anatomical arrangement, which can suggest the body was moved or the burial disturbed at some point in antiquity. Alongside him were two ceramic vessels: a complete tripartite bowl, a form divided into three decorative zones, and sherds of a bipartite bowl. Pottery of this kind is a characteristic feature of Early Bronze Age cist burials in Ireland. A radiocarbon date derived from a collagen sample placed the burial at 3700 plus or minus 30 BP, calibrating to somewhere between 2200 and 1980 BC, placing this individual in the centuries when agriculture and metalworking were already well established across the island. The find is documented by Cahill and Sikora in their 2011 study of Irish Bronze Age burial pottery.