The construction of a new road link between the Killarney Road and Tralee town, the N22, was what prompted the excavation in the townland of Ballycarty, about four kilometres east of the town, on a 200-metre limestone spur sitting fifty metres south of the River Lee. What emerged from beneath the sod was something considerably more layered than anyone had anticipated: not a single monument, but a burial site that had been rebuilt, remodelled, and rethought across multiple distinct phases of prehistoric activity.

The earliest structure uncovered by archaeologist Michael Connolly, excavating under licence No. 96E0138, was a cairn, that is a mound of stone and earth built over a burial, laid down in alternating layers and covering a small passage tomb. A passage tomb is a type of megalithic monument in which a stone-lined corridor leads to a central burial chamber, typically used for collective or repeated interment. Here, three concentric rings of limestone boulders surrounded a roughly built passage just 1.4 metres long. In a second phase, a curved monumental façade of limestone slabs, standing to 1.3 metres in places, was added to the western face of the monument, and a new orthostatic passage, about three metres long, was pushed through it to reach a rock-cut chamber measuring 1.5 by 1.2 metres. Orthostatic construction means walls formed from large upright slabs rather than smaller coursed stone. A third and final phase saw this passage partially dismantled and rebuilt using drystone walling, with the chamber itself replaced by a D-shaped drystone structure set inside the original rock-cut feature. That final chamber contained cremated bone and worked flints. Each successive rebuilding disturbed what came before, so the full picture of who was buried here, and when, remains incomplete. Alongside the tomb, a substantial rampart of earth and stone enclosed much of the spur, and strikingly, one section of this later rampart veered sharply westward when it reached the passage tomb, as if deliberately skirting the burial site rather than cutting through it.