The find was unexpected enough, but what followed was stranger still. Rather than being quietly removed to a laboratory or museum store, the remains were placed in a box and taken to the Garda barracks in the nearby town of Foxford, where, according to the Irish Independent of the 9th of November 1935, hundreds of people were coming to view it every day.

The sheer volume of visitors to a rural police station suggests how much the discovery caught the local imagination. Unscheduled encounters with the dead have always carried a particular charge in Ireland, where the ground is layered with burials of every era, from prehistoric cist graves to early Christian long-cist burials to medieval churchyard interments. The Drumrevagh skeleton arrived without context, its age and origin unrecorded in what survives of the contemporary reports. The act of building a house, one of the most ordinary things a person can do, had suddenly produced a queue of curious neighbours filing past a box in a barracks hallway.