The field gives almost nothing away above ground, but when the soil is ploughed, a spread of stones roughly six metres across breaks the surface, marking the approximate location of something much older underneath.

A cist is a small, box-like burial chamber formed from upright stone slabs, typically covered by a capstone and often associated with Bronze Age interments. The Bawnard example came to wider attention in 1924, when the Reverend W. Ferris recorded the discovery of just such a structure, stone-lined and containing a ceramic urn. The cist itself had left no visible trace by the time later investigators examined the site, though the landowner was able to point to where it had been. A separate thread of evidence comes from the 1940s Schools Manuscript collection, in which the local placename recorded here was 'Ladhar an Cairn', meaning roughly the fork or nook of the cairn. The accompanying description noted that a corpse surrounded on all sides by slabs of stone had been found beneath a cairn at this spot, language that aligns closely with what a cist burial beneath a stone mound would look like. The convergence of Ferris's 1924 account and this earlier placename tradition, written down in the 1940s but almost certainly older in origin, suggests the memory of the burial had persisted in local knowledge long before any formal record was made. John Waddell's 1990 survey of Irish Bronze Age burial also references the site.