A flat cemetery of this kind, unlike a cairn or barrow, has no mound to announce itself; the burials sit just below the surface, invisible until the earth gives them up. Between 1933 and 1944, nine such features were uncovered here, eight cists and one pit burial, spread across the ridge in a loose arrangement that suggests repeated, deliberate use of the same piece of ground over time.

A cist is a small box-like grave constructed from upright stone slabs, roofed with a capstone, and often furnished with a floor slab. The examples at Ballinchalla range considerably in size and type. Two of the longer cists, around 1.4 to 1.5 metres in length, held extended or cremated human remains in the more traditional manner. Others were far smaller, short cists barely 0.4 metres long, suited to receiving cremated bone packed into ceramic vessels. Cist 3, for instance, contained an inverted vase urn holding the cremated remains of an infant. Cist 4, divided into two compartments by a transverse slab, yielded a highly decorated lidded vase alongside a cremation in its north-east section, and a second vase with cremated bone in the south-west. Not all the graves were so richly furnished: cist 6 held a plano-convex flint knife stored in what was recorded as a bowl-shaped grass container, and cist 5 included a fragment of bronze wire, since lost. Cist 7, divided like cist 4, contained nothing at all. The pit burial added its own quiet strangeness to the group, its cremated bones accompanied by charcoal and, oddly, hare teeth.