A townland named Gallowshill carries its own explanation, and the bones that have been surfacing here over the years do little to dispel it. On a slight rise in undulating pasture in County Kildare, a sand pit has at various points yielded human remains, most recently in 1992. The adult inhumations, found at opposite edges of the pit roughly seventy metres apart, are regarded locally as the remains of people who were hanged, and the working assumption has long been that the executions took place in 1798.

That year casts a long shadow across County Kildare. The rebellion of the United Irishmen in the summer of 1798 was met with savage reprisals throughout Leinster, and many of those killed or executed in the aftermath were buried without ceremony or formal record. The place name itself, Gallowshill, points to a site where public hangings may once have been carried out, a use that would have given the location a kind of grim administrative logic at the time. One of the two identified burials, on the western edge of the pit, is thought to be that of a mature adult; the second lies to the east. The sand pit is no longer active, though deposits of fine sand remain visible to the north of the site.