What came to light was a cistvaen, the old antiquarian term for a box-like stone cist burial, a type of funerary chamber typically constructed from large flat slabs arranged to form walls and a roof. This one was modest in scale, roughly five feet long, three and a half feet wide, and three feet deep, built from two flags on each side, two at each end, and covered by three capstones laid across the top. Among those capstones was an ogham stone, one of the inscribed standing stones used in early medieval Ireland to record names and lineage in a script of notched lines cut along a central stem. That a carved inscription had been repurposed as roofing material suggests the chamber was assembled, or perhaps reassembled, at a point when the original meaning of the stone had already been forgotten or set aside. Those who first opened the chamber reported black earth, charcoal, and fragments of a ceramic vessel inside, the kind of modest, fragmentary evidence that points to funerary ritual without spelling it out.

Richard Rolt Brash, the Cork antiquary who recorded the site in 1879, noted that the ground around the chamber was slightly raised in a circular form, suggesting what he called the base of a tumulus, meaning the remnant of an earthen mound that would once have covered the burial. By his time, most of that mounding had long since been reduced by agriculture. A later visit to the same site by a researcher named Quarry in 1896 added further complexity to the picture: a possible souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of the kind associated with early medieval settlements, was identified nearby, along with three additional ogham stones. The clustering of four ogham inscriptions at a single location is unusual and implies the site held some significance over a sustained period, perhaps as a burial ground that continued to attract commemoration long after its initial use.