It was only because a new road cut directly through the mound in 1990 that these burials came to light at all, prompting a rapid rescue excavation before the work could continue.

A cist is a small stone-built grave box, typically constructed by setting slabs on their edges to form walls, then capping the whole thing with flat roofing stones. The example uncovered here is trapezoidal in plan, measuring roughly 1.62 metres east to west and just 0.48 metres across, with one notably long shale slab, over a metre in length, forming part of the northern wall. Three slabs form the southern side, with single slabs closing each end, and the floor is hard, compact sand. Six roofing slabs were found, though in a disturbed state. A second cist lay less than a metre to the northwest, also beneath the mound. Both were excavated by the National Museum of Ireland in 1990. What the graves cannot tell us, unfortunately, is who was buried in them. No skeletal remains survived in either cist, and the precise relationship between the burial chambers and the mound that covered them remains unclear. Whether the mound was built specifically for these graves, or whether the graves were inserted into an existing structure, is a question the excavation could not resolve.