Beneath it, placed there in the primary act of constructing the monument, are the cremated remains of a person. That detail, primary position, means this was not a later intrusion or reuse; the burial and the circle were conceived together, the one built around the other.

The site was excavated and described by Lynch in 1981. What the excavation recovered was modest in material terms: a pit, a covering slab, and cremated bone. Analysis of the bone suggested the individual was probably aged between 25 and 30 years at death. No sex was recorded. Stone circles of this five-stone type are a distinctive feature of the Cork and Kerry landscape, relatively small in scale compared to the great rings of the midlands or the north, and are generally understood to belong to the Bronze Age. The placement of a cremation at the centre is known from other such monuments, but that pattern does nothing to diminish the particular quality of this find: a young adult, their age determinable three thousand or more years later from fragments recovered on a Kerry hillside.

The site sits on a terrace on the north-east-facing slopes of Knocknaveacal, within rough grazing land. The five-stone circle with which the burial is associated carries its own separate monument record, and the two features together make this a site where the funerary and the ceremonial are, quite literally, inseparable.