When a field bank at Walterstown in County Kildare was bulldozed in 1967, the machinery exposed something that had lain undisturbed for centuries: human bones. What followed was not a formal excavation planned well in advance, but the kind of reactive investigation that occasionally opens a small, unexpected window onto the medieval past.

The National Museum of Ireland examined the site after the initial disturbance and found further burials still in place. These were extended inhumations, meaning the bodies had been laid out flat and at full length, oriented east to west in the manner consistent with Christian burial practice, where the body faces east in anticipation of resurrection. The graves were unlined, with no stone cists or coffin traces, and nothing was recovered from within them to help date the individuals or indicate their status. A single medieval potsherd found nearby in disturbed earth offered the only material clue, placing some activity at the site somewhere between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. The burials lie in close proximity to the remains of what may have been a nunnery, and the two sites are likely connected, with the graveyard perhaps serving the religious community that once occupied the adjacent enclosure. The possible nunnery itself remains only partially understood, and the relationship between the two sites has never been fully resolved by excavation.