The grave had been there all along, beneath the working ground of a farm, entirely unknown until the machine's bucket broke through it.

When archaeologists Hurley and Ó Drisceoill excavated the site in 1978, they uncovered what they described as a boat-shaped cist, a type of grave formed by setting upright stone slabs on their edges to create a narrow box, then covering the whole thing with further slabs laid flat across the top. A cist of this kind is essentially a stone coffin built in place rather than carved from a single block. This particular example measured a maximum of 1.8 metres in length, 0.5 metres in width, and 0.25 metres in height, tapering toward the eastern end, with the underlying bedrock serving as its floor. The long axis ran east to west, and the human skeleton found inside followed that orientation precisely, skull positioned at the wider western end and feet at the narrow eastern end. The east-west alignment is a feature found across a wide range of early burial traditions in Ireland, and the boat-like taper of the cist gives the grave an almost purposeful, vessel-like quality, as though the body had been laid in something intended to carry it somewhere.