What lay beneath was a cist, a type of box-like burial chamber formed by setting stone slabs on edge and laying further slabs across the top as a lid, measuring six and a half feet in length, two feet wide at its centre, and between one foot four inches and one foot six inches deep. Oriented roughly east to west, the sandstone-lined chamber had no paved floor, and nothing about the surrounding field would have told a passing eye that anything was there.

The site was excavated that same year by M. J. O'Kelly, whose findings introduced several puzzles that were never fully resolved. The skeletal remains inside had been disturbed at some point before discovery, and were found jumbled together at the eastern end of the cist rather than laid out in any recognisable arrangement. Analysis of the bones indicated that almost all belonged to an adult female, with one exception: the lower half of a right femur, the thigh bone, from a male. Whether the two individuals were interred together originally, or whether one set of remains was introduced later into an existing grave, the evidence could not say. A small pit, nine inches across, cut into the floor at the eastern end held fragments of charcoal that were identified as Scots Pine, a detail that points toward ritual or funerary practice but stops short of explanation. Scots Pine had a long presence in the Irish landscape before declining significantly, and its charcoal appears at various prehistoric burial and ceremonial sites, though what significance it held for those who placed it here remains a matter of inference.