Sometime between 1142 and 1310 BC, a child was cremated and buried in what is now the Grey Abbey area of Kildare town, their grave marked with a wooden post driven into the ground above them. That post, and the burial beneath it, survived for more than three thousand years before being uncovered in 2005 during excavation ahead of a commercial development in a field adjacent to the Grey Abbey site.

The discovery came about through the standard process of licensed archaeological investigation that precedes large-scale ground disturbance in Ireland. Excavators working in 'Field 1' found the cremated remains of a juvenile sealed beneath a capping layer of brown clay, roughly ten centimetres thick and mottled with orange redeposited subsoil, the kind of deliberate covering that suggests a considered burial rather than casual disposal. A radiocarbon date obtained from charcoal within the burial deposit placed the cremation firmly in the Bronze Age, specifically within the range 1142 to 1310 BC at two sigma confidence. The marker post set beside or above the grave is a particularly evocative detail: it implies that someone intended the spot to be remembered, at least for a time. A number of additional posts were found nearby and to the east, which may also belong to a prehistoric phase, though their precise relationship to the burial remains uncertain.