No cairn marked the spot, no enclosing kerb of boulders, just the pit itself and the stone at its base, which is what archaeologists mean when they describe a grave as unprotected. The world above it continued as normal, and then in November 1928, quarry workers at Ticknock broke through into that quiet and brought it back into the light.

Two vase urns were recovered from the site, one of them containing the cremated remains of an adult female. Vase urns are a type of Bronze Age ceramic vessel, typically round-bodied with a collar or shoulder, and they appear across Ireland and Britain as containers for the dead during the second millennium BC. The Ticknock find was documented by researchers Cahill and Sikora, whose 2011 study draws together many such discoveries from the Dublin and Wicklow uplands. The quarrying that uncovered the burial was also, inevitably, what destroyed any broader context the site might have offered, making it impossible to know whether this woman was buried alone or as part of a wider funerary landscape.

The precise location of the find within the Ticknock quarry area has not been recorded with enough accuracy to pinpoint it on the ground today, and the quarry itself has long since been absorbed into the changed topography of the hillside. Ticknock is accessible from the southern fringes of Dublin city via the Ticknock Road, and the area forms part of the Dublin Mountains Way walking network. There is nothing to see at the burial site specifically, because its exact position is unknown. What the area does offer is a sense of the broader landscape that Bronze Age communities inhabited and, in places, chose as their burial ground, a high, exposed terrain that was apparently considered appropriate for the dead long before anyone thought to quarry it for stone.