The pit was cut to exactly the size needed to contain the urn and nothing more. Fragments of a second urn were found at the edge of the same pit, suggesting something more complicated than a single act of interment.

The site was excavated by O'Kelly in 1952, and the burial sits on the south-western side of a ring barrow, one of the circular earthwork monuments associated with Bronze Age funerary practice. The burial itself was enclosed by a short curving fosse, a shallow ditch, whose ends connect with the fosse of the adjacent ring barrow, effectively incorporating the urn burial into the wider monument complex. Nearby stands a multiple cist cairn, a cairn containing several stone-lined grave boxes, adding to the concentration of prehistoric burial activity in this small area. When the extension fosse enclosing the urn burial was cut, it disturbed an earlier Food Vessel burial, a type of interment associated with a distinctive style of Bronze Age ceramic also placed with the dead. That disturbance implies the landscape was already layered with burial when the urn burial was made, and that whoever placed the urn there either did not know about what lay beneath, or did not much mind. The Encrusted Urn itself is a form of decorated Bronze Age pottery particular to Ireland, characterised by applied clay ridges and ornament built up on the surface of the vessel.