The pit measured roughly 0.4 metres by 0.3 metres and was only 0.15 metres deep, yet it was packed entirely with burnt bone. Resting in the upper layer of those remains was an inverted pygmy vessel, a term used for the small, finely made pottery cups that appear occasionally in Bronze Age burials and whose exact purpose remains a matter of debate among archaeologists. Whether it was placed mouth-down deliberately or simply settled that way over time, the gesture carries a quiet intentionality across three or four thousand years.

The burial was excavated in 1950 by Seán P. Ó Ríordáin and Máire Mac Dermott, whose findings were published the following year. What they uncovered was not an isolated grave but part of a broader funerary landscape on that same rise. Close by lay a possible burial cairn, a type of stone mound raised over the dead, along with three cists, which are small stone-lined box graves, and a second pit burial, all apparently of Bronze Age date. The plateau, then, appears to have functioned as a place of repeated and deliberate burial. Sometime later, the entire complex was overlain by a rath, an enclosed farmstead of the kind built in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular earthen bank and ditch surrounding a homestead. Whether those later inhabitants knew what lay beneath their settlement, or whether the elevated ground simply made practical sense for both the living and the dead, the landscape absorbed one era quietly into the next.