Eskers are long, winding ridges of gravel and sand deposited by meltwater streams beneath glaciers, and this one extends roughly east to west through the townland of Cleghile. At its western end, the ridge has been shaped into an irregular earthwork, though much of it has since been absorbed into the embankment of a railway line running along its southern edge. When earth was removed during railway construction, and again when a ditch was cut beside a road that now cuts through the earthwork, human bones began to surface. The bones of very tall men, according to local memory.

Writing in 1913, a researcher named Flynn proposed that Cleghile, along with the neighbouring townlands of Corrogemore and Corrogebeg, corresponds to an early medieval territory called Cnamchoill. The name itself is suggestive; in Irish, cnamh means bone, and coill means wood, so Cnamchoill might be rendered as something like the wood of bones. Flynn connected this territory to a battle fought between Brian Boru and the Danes, arguing that the battlefield lay at Cleghile. Brian Boru, the High King of Ireland who died at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014, campaigned extensively against Norse forces in the years before that final confrontation, and a skirmish in this part of Tipperary would sit plausibly within that broader period. Whether the bones uncovered here are the remains of soldiers from that engagement, or belong to an entirely different burial tradition, has never been established. The earthwork, the railway, the road, and the long memory of skeletal remains all occupy the same ground without quite resolving into a single story.