It measures one metre in length, half a metre wide, and half a metre deep, sealed with a flat flag capstone and floored with gravel. A cist of this kind is a Bronze Age burial chamber, typically built from upright slabs and tucked into the earth, individual and intimate in a way that larger megalithic monuments are not. This one sat unrecognised for centuries before a farmer or labourer stumbled across it around 1850, and it would wait another eighty years before anyone looked closely at what was inside.

When the cist was formally examined in 1933, it yielded two things: the fragmentary remains of a ceramic vessel, likely a funerary urn of the kind commonly placed with Bronze Age burials, and the skeleton of an adult male interred in a crouched position, knees drawn up toward the chest, head oriented toward the east. That eastward facing is thought to carry significance, possibly aligned with the rising sun, though the precise meaning remains a matter of interpretation rather than certainty. The burial lies roughly 35 metres to the east-northeast of a barrow, a low earthen mound also used for Bronze Age burial, suggesting that this patch of elevated Mayo ground may have held some wider ceremonial or funerary importance in prehistoric times. The examination and its findings were published in the Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society in 1934.