The feature was modest in scale, an oval, earth-cut shaft roughly 1.42 metres across and 2.2 metres deep, filled with silty sand and eventually sealed with clay packed with stone and slate. What made it extraordinary was what that sealing had preserved: the skeletal remains of an adult male who had slumped into the well after its sides gave way, coming to rest in the silt below.

The man's bones carried evidence of a traumatic death, and the remains have been dated to the fifteenth century, a period when the Blackfriary, a Dominican friary, would have been an active religious community. Whether the collapse of the well was connected to his death or simply the means by which his body came to rest there is not something the archaeology can resolve. Around the well, excavators recorded three further truncated inhumations, partial burials whose edges had been cut through by later activity, suggesting that this corner of the site had seen repeated, and not always careful, use as a place of burial. The excavation, carried out under reference E002398 and reported by Seaver in 2011, offers a compressed and quietly unsettling picture of life and death at the margins of a medieval friary, where the boundary between a working structure and a burial site was apparently thinner than one might expect.