The Curragh in County Kildare is best known today as the home of Irish flat racing, a wide open limestone plain where horses have been trained and run for centuries. It was the construction of a new gallops that brought something far older to light: a prehistoric cremation ground, discovered not through a dedicated archaeological dig but almost incidentally, as the machinery broke ground for a seven-furlong training track.

In 1996, archaeologist Conway conducted monitoring and limited excavation under licence as the gallops, roughly four and a half metres wide and sixty centimetres deep, were cut into the plain. What emerged was a cluster of 28 pits, four spreads of charcoal-rich soil, and six concentrations of burnt bone. The pits ranged in shape from circular to oval to occasionally elongated, and varied considerably in size, from under half a metre to one and a half metres in diameter. Crucially, pyre material, the scorched debris of the burning itself, was found mixed in among the cremated bone. In prehistoric cremation practice, remains were sometimes burned on a pyre elsewhere and the bones collected and placed in a pit; here, the evidence suggested the burning had happened on the spot, the bodies reduced in the very places where the pits were later dug or perhaps formed by the fires themselves. The site had not survived entirely intact: post-medieval cultivation ridges, the lazy-bed-style earthworks used for tillage in later centuries, had cut through and disturbed much of the deposit before anyone knew it was there.