The burial, orientated west to east in the manner conventional for Christian interment, belonged to a child aged somewhere between three and six years old. What made it unusual was not simply its isolation from any known cemetery, but the evidence that the bones had been disturbed and reburied at some point in the past, before construction work of a later era truncated the grave further still.

The site at No. 23 James Street sits roughly twenty metres northwest of where St James's Gate once stood, one of the formal entry points through the medieval town wall of the Hightown of Kilkenny. That proximity matters as context: the ground here has been occupied and modified continuously since the medieval period, and test excavations carried out by archaeologist Paul Stevens in 2000 revealed not only the child burial but also medieval pits, a well, and a furnace, all compressed into a plot now fronted by a three-storey Edwardian house with modern extensions to the rear. The grave-cut itself measured just under a metre in length and less than half a metre wide, and the backfill contained a small fragment of brick, an unremarkable material that nonetheless hints at the complicated stratigraphy of a long-used urban plot. Why the child was buried here, apart from any consecrated ground, and why the remains were apparently moved and re-deposited before the site was built over, remains unanswered.