The discovery was recorded by Power in 1907, who noted that human bodies had been found in a sandpit and were supposed to be soldiers killed during the siege of Clonmel in 1649.

The siege in question was one of the more consequential engagements of the Cromwellian campaign in Ireland. Clonmel, defended by a Connacht Ulster army under Hugh Dubh O'Neill, held out long enough to inflict serious casualties on Cromwell's forces before the garrison slipped away under cover of night. The town fell in May 1650, and the surrounding landscape presumably absorbed the dead from both sides. Whether the bodies at Tannersrath belonged to the besieging Parliamentarian troops or the defending Irish soldiers has never been established. The 1906 Ordnance Survey six-inch map marks a quarry at this location, and local memory connects the extraction of sand there to the construction of St. Luke's hospital in Clonmel. The quarry was filled in around forty years before the site was recorded, returning the ground to agricultural use.

Today the field shows no surface trace of what lies beneath it. A silage pit sits at the northern end of the former quarry area, and a bungalow stands in the adjacent field to the west. The whole arrangement is entirely unremarkable to look at, which is perhaps the point. Mass graves from seventeenth-century military campaigns were rarely marked, and this one has simply become part of the working landscape around it.