The urn was of the cordoned type, a form of ceramic vessel produced during the Irish Bronze Age and typically used to contain the cremated remains of the dead, with raised horizontal bands encircling the body. What made this particular example notable was its decoration: incised and hatched patterns covering the entire surface. Inverted burial, where the urn is placed mouth-downward over the cremated remains, was a recognised practice of the period, and the Ballyvelig vessel fits that pattern precisely, though the cremated bone it contained was too fragmentary to tell archaeologists anything further about the individual interred.

The 1935 find, recorded by Ó Ríordáin the following year, was not the first hint that this hillside had served a funerary purpose. Local accounts suggest that a similar urn had been uncovered around 1890 approximately 230 metres to the north-north-west, raising the possibility that burials in this area were not isolated incidents but part of a broader, if loosely scattered, Bronze Age presence in the landscape. That possibility prompted more recent investigation. A geophysical survey carried out by J. M. Leigh across a small area of roughly 60 by 40 metres, positioned about 120 metres to the north-east of the find spot, detected what appeared to be archaeological features beneath the ground. When C. McLoughlin followed up with targeted excavation in 2020, however, no archaeological features were confirmed. The landscape, in other words, has so far declined to give much more away.