In 1948, workers cutting into a sand pit broke apart a bowl-shaped pit that had sat undisturbed for millennia, scattering the cremated bones it once held and leaving them lost for good. What survived the damage was the urn itself, an Encrusted Urn of a type associated with Bronze Age burial practice in Ireland, where such vessels were placed inverted over the remains of the cremated dead as a kind of ceramic cover.

When the archaeologist O'Kelly examined the site in 1950, he found that the pit, roughly two and a half feet across and a foot and a half deep, had been cut into the western side of a polygonal cist, a stone-lined grave box, which lay nearby. The urn, reconstructed to a height of around sixteen inches, is a quietly detailed object. Its rim is rounded, and the interior bevel is marked with rows of short oblique incisions on narrow raised bands. The outer surface carries a row of oblique strokes near the top, while the rest of the body is decorated with lenticular bosses, small lens-shaped applied pellets of clay, arranged in staggered horizontal rows. The fabric is a coarse ware, buff to red in colour. This combination of applied ornament and incised decoration is characteristic of the Encrusted Urn tradition, a style found across Ireland during the earlier part of the second millennium BC. The location of the two burials in this townland has more recently been pinpointed by local historian Nioclás Ó Duinnín, recovering some of the precise geographical context that the quarrying had threatened to erase entirely.