The absence of human remains is not the result of careless excavation; it is simply what was there, or rather, what was not. What did survive was a ceramic vessel described as an "anomalous food vessel", a term pointing to the fact that it did not fit neatly into the established typological categories that archaeologists use to classify Bronze Age pottery. The pot was lying on its side, placed roughly a third of the way along the cist from its western end, close to the southern upright stones. It is a small, strange detail that resists easy explanation.

The mound in question, designated Tumulus I, sits within a dense archaeological complex at Cush on Slievereagh, a hillside in south County Limerick. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in the years around 1917 to 1919, identified the wider area as the supposed site of Temaír Erann, the ancient cemetery of a tribal group known as the Ernai. The excavation of Tumulus I was carried out by Seán P. Ó Ríordáin between 1934 and 1935, and his published account from 1940 remains the primary record of what was found. A cist, in this context, is a box-like grave lined and covered with flat stones, typically used for individual burials during the Bronze Age. This one was built with considerable care: three upright stones forming each long side, a large single upright at one end and two smaller parallel uprights at the other, the floor paved with irregular flat stones, and smaller stones packed in to stabilise the structure. It measured 1.9 metres in length and up to 0.6 metres in width, oriented east to west. Notably, an urn burial had already been uncovered from the same mound in 1924, a decade before Ó Ríordáin's dig.

The site sits within reclaimed pasture, with a ringfort approximately 27 metres to the north-east and two further burial mounds immediately to the south, giving some sense of how layered this landscape remains beneath its agricultural surface. The area is not formally developed for visitors, and the mounds themselves are subtle features in the terrain, easily overlooked without prior knowledge of what to look for. Ó Ríordáin's original plans and photographs, along with aerial orthoimages, offer the clearest guide to understanding the spatial relationship between the various monuments. Anyone approaching the site should expect rough ground and bear in mind that the cist itself is no longer visible; it was revealed by excavation and is not a standing structure. The interest lies in reading the landscape rather than inspecting any single exposed feature.