What was once a low esker, the kind of gravelly ridge left behind by retreating glaciers, served as a cemetery for prehistoric burials arranged without mounds or markers above ground. These are known as flat cemeteries precisely because nothing visible was ever raised over them, which is partly why they survive so poorly and why the one at Cartenstown went undiscovered until someone put a spade into a garden in the late 1950s.

The first cist came to light around 1958, found about twenty-five centimetres below the surface during routine digging. A cist is a small stone-lined grave box, typically constructed from upright slabs with a large capstone laid over the top. The one at Cartenstown was compact, measuring roughly sixty-three centimetres in length, with walls that inclined slightly inward toward the capstone, which had been propped on four smaller stones at the corners rather than resting directly on the side slabs. The grave was not fully sealed, and sand and earth had worked their way inside over the centuries. Within it lay a crouched adult skeleton, placed on its right side in a posture typical of Bronze Age burial practice. A second phase of discovery followed in 1961, when further investigation of the same gravel ridge revealed two more cists, one of them containing fragments of a child's skeleton. In total, three cists were identified, though the first to be found was destroyed before it could be properly examined. By 1970, the scholar John Waddell had drawn together descriptions of the site, noting that at least two of the cists were oriented roughly north to south, with side slabs in one case overlapping each other.

By the time a field inspection was carried out in 1980, a modern house had been built directly on the low rise where the cists had been recorded. No archaeological features remained visible. The esker itself, the gravel ridge that Bronze Age people apparently selected as a meaningful place to bury their dead, had been absorbed into the landscape of everyday domestic life, leaving no surface trace of the small, carefully constructed graves that once lay just beneath it.