When a long cist burial came to light in a domestic garden at Britonstown, County Wicklow in early 1980, it triggered a rescue excavation that uncovered two further cists nearby. Then, in January 2013, at least six more were revealed during subsequent ground works. The full extent of the burial ground remains uncertain.

A cist is a type of stone-lined grave, essentially a box of upright slabs set into a prepared pit and covered with flat roofing stones, used across prehistoric Ireland and Britain. The three cists excavated in 1980, reported by Bourke and Clinton in 1983 to 1984, were all orientated east to west, with the heads of the burials placed at the western end. The first, measuring 1.9 metres in length and tapering from 0.45 metres wide at the west to just 0.15 metres at the east, had been covered by a low mound of unknown character before being disturbed by machinery. The second cist had been interfered with in antiquity; its roofing slabs and one side slab had been removed and the grave refilled, leaving some bones displaced high in the fill. The third cist, undisturbed and sealed by ten roofing slabs, lay immediately adjacent, partly overlapping the eastern end of the second. It seems plausible that whoever built the third cist helped themselves to the roofing material of the second. All three contained extended skeletons lying on their backs. Alongside the graves, excavators found three pits and a cluster of stake holes. One pit held a deposit of slag, possibly the remains of a furnace. The stake holes suggest some kind of temporary structure had stood nearby. The sole artefact recovered was half of the lower stone of a rotary disc quern, the kind of hand-powered grinding stone used to mill grain. Traces of what may be an enclosing feature are also visible in a field to the west, suggesting the cemetery was once bounded in some way, though its boundaries have never been fully mapped.