No pottery, no personal objects, no grave goods of any kind. Just the remains, set into low-lying ground near a natural watercourse at Mitchellsfort, and left there for what turned out to be a very long time.

The burial came to light in 2001 during archaeological monitoring carried out ahead of construction work on the N8 Glanmire-Watergrasshill Bypass. Road schemes of this kind routinely require monitoring by archaeologists as groundworks proceed, and it was through this process that the cremation was identified and formally excavated. Cremation burials like this one, isolated and without accompanying material, are not unknown in the Irish archaeological record, but they present particular difficulties for interpretation. The absence of pottery is especially unhelpful: ceramics are often the most reliable means of assigning a rough date to a burial, since different vessel types belong to recognisable periods. Without them, and without any other finds, it is not possible to say with confidence when this person lived or died. The location beside a watercourse may be significant, as water features held ritual and boundary meanings in many prehistoric and early historic cultures, though that association can only be noted, not confirmed, for this particular site.