The site near Kill in County Kerry appeared on the Ordnance Survey map of 1841 to 1842, labelled plainly as "Old Graveyard", and then was simply absent from the later edition, as though the cartographers had thought better of it. What the ground itself contained, however, proved more enduring than any map notation.

In 1987, a souterrain was discovered in the area, and excavation was undertaken by Mary Cahill of the National Museum of Ireland. A souterrain is an underground stone-built passage or chamber, typically associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, and this one was sub-rectangular in plan, constructed of small stones and capped by large flat slabs. Inside lay the fully extended skeleton of a woman, her body oriented east to west with her head to the west, an arrangement that inverts the usual Christian burial convention of facing east. A small spread of charcoal was found near the upper right side of the skeleton. Radiocarbon dating subsequently placed her death in the tenth century, situating her firmly in early medieval Ireland, a period of considerable cultural and political turbulence across the island. The use of a souterrain as a burial location is itself unusual; these structures were generally built for storage or refuge rather than interment, which gives this woman's presence within one a quietly unresolved quality.