Nobody had been looking for a grave. The workmen were cutting a section through an earthen boundary wall when they turned up the slabs, and the excavation of that fence was promptly abandoned. What they had found was a cist, the term for a Bronze Age stone-lined burial box, typically formed from upright slabs with a capstone on top. This one was incomplete and somewhat irregular, its sides not quite parallel, one end partially missing, and no covering stone remaining. The floor was laid in what the excavator called a "crazy pavement" of flat slabs, and on that floor rested the cremated remains of two people: a young adult and a child of about two or three years old. The bones were accompanied by two pottery food vessels, the kind routinely placed with cremation burials in this period.

The discovery was made during excavations between 1934 and 1935 led by Seán P. Ó Ríordáin, who was investigating the ancient field systems of the area. The site sits on Slievereagh, known in Irish as Sliabh Riabhach, at a place identified by the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp in the early twentieth century as the supposed location of Temaír Erann, the ancient burial ground of the Ernai tribe. Westropp noted this connection in several publications between 1917 and 1919. The cist was not isolated; it lay within a substantial archaeological complex that includes a ringfort roughly 75 metres to the north-east and three bowl-barrows, low rounded earthen mounds used for burial, just 10 metres away. The pottery vessels recovered from the cist were restored by a Miss Barnes of the National Museum, though Ó Ríordáin noted that no trace of a mound or any surface feature had been visible above the grave before its accidental uncovering.

The cist itself is no longer visible above ground; nothing marks the spot today. The surrounding landscape of reclaimed pasture on Slievereagh gives little obvious indication of the density of remains beneath and around it. The bowl-barrows nearby are the most likely features to catch the eye, and the broader field system, though not dramatic to look at, is part of what made this area significant enough for sustained investigation in the 1930s. Anyone visiting the area should consult the Historic Environment Viewer, which maps the full cluster of monuments at Cush, before setting out, as the individual features are spread across working farmland and require some orientation to locate.