The landowner, turning the ground for corn, unearthed what had once been a large ceramic urn, already shattered by the moment of its rediscovery. What survived was enough to tell a partial story, and to raise a few questions that remain open.

The urn had been placed inverted over a flagstone, a practice common in Bronze Age burial ritual, where a cremated deposit would be enclosed beneath the upended vessel. The stone on which it rested measured roughly 54 centimetres by 26 centimetres and was only a little wider than the urn itself. The vessel was described by the landowner as 18 inches high and 12 inches wide, though the archaeologist Kavanagh, writing in 1973, considered those proportions unusual for the type and questioned whether the dimensions had been accurately remembered or recorded. Five sherds that survived the plough eventually made their way to the National Museum in Dublin, and Kavanagh identified them as belonging to an Encrusted Urn, a style of Bronze Age pottery distinguished by its applied decorative elements. On the interior, three bands and grooves run down about four centimetres below the rim; on the outside, broad raised ribs divide the surface into panels; there are traces of perforation below the decorative bands, and a body sherd carries incised alternating oblique strokes. Encrusted Urns are associated broadly with the earlier part of the second millennium BC, and the care taken in their decoration suggests these vessels held some ceremonial significance beyond simple utility.

The flagstone on which the urn once rested still exists, relocated now to a field fence at the southern end of the pasture field where the burial was found. It is a modest remnant, easy to overlook, but it is the only physical trace of the burial that remains in situ at Gortavehy. The sherds themselves, held in Dublin, carry the finer details of what was almost certainly a deliberate and considered interment on that slope above Duhallow, placed there by someone, for someone, well over three thousand years ago.