A cist, in this context, is a box-like grave constructed from upright stone slabs and sealed with a covering stone, typically used during the Bronze Age for individual or small-group burials. This one had been set into a cut pit, its lowest six inches hewn directly from bedrock, the gaps behind the side slabs packed with boulders, and its floor laid with a single flat basal slab. When workmen struck it, they smashed both the capstone and one of the ceramic vessels inside before anyone could intervene.

The archaeologist M. J. O'Kelly investigated the site in 1946 and was able to reconstruct much of what had been placed inside. The cist measured roughly three feet two inches by two feet three inches, with an east-west long axis, and its side slabs inclined inwards, the western one supplemented with drystone walling to support the now-destroyed capstone. Inside, a pile of cremated bone had been placed at the centre of the basal slab. In the north-west corner sat a Food Vessel Vase, possibly once containing further cremated remains, and in the south-east corner the fragments of what had been a Pygmy Cup. These are Bronze Age ceramic forms: a Food Vessel Vase is a relatively substantial decorated pot associated with funerary deposits, while a Pygmy Cup is a small accessory vessel whose precise ritual purpose remains debated. The Pygmy Cup was bi-conical with imperforate lugs on its shoulder, but it had been too badly damaged by the workmen to survive intact. The Food Vessel Vase, standing 0.18 metres high with a maximum diameter of the same, was more fortunate. Its decoration is remarkably detailed: an everted lip with herringbone grooving on the inner bevel, then on the exterior a repeating sequence of horizontal grooves, stabbed incisions, rows of short vertical lines, and broad bands of hatched triangles, the patterning continuing up onto the neck. O'Kelly's published description of it runs to nearly a page, which gives some sense of the care that went into its original making.