The discovery came about in the most ordinary of circumstances: a homeowner digging a trench beside a wooden gazebo, a few metres from the back wall of the house, and then the unmistakable appearance of human bone. What had seemed like a routine bit of garden work turned out to open a much older layer of use for this particular piece of ground, an elevated sandy knoll with the land sloping away sharply to the south and west, the kind of topographical feature that communities across many centuries found appropriate for burial.

The site first came to attention in 2018, when Laureen Buckley visited on behalf of the National Museum of Ireland and recovered the skull of an adult female along with portions of a femur and other bones. A subsequent inspection by Matthew Seaver involved extending the original trench to roughly 1.3 metres by 1.1 metres. What the soil revealed was a layered picture of past and present compressed into a shallow column: near the gazebo's concrete sill beam, the sand contained cable ties, plastic children's toys, and other modern debris down to around half a metre. Below that, and to the west of the trench, lay the disturbed remains of one individual, a mandible, pelvis fragments, and a broken femur, bones that had clearly been moved at some earlier point. Beneath those, an articulated run of vertebrae continued west to east across the trench floor. On the south-eastern side, a second skull appeared almost immediately below the surface. The west-east orientation of the burials is a detail worth noting: this alignment, with the head to the west and feet to the east, is characteristic of Christian burial practice in Ireland, suggesting the cemetery may be medieval or early modern in date, though radiocarbon dating had yet to be completed at the time of the investigation. Seaver concluded that the site constitutes, by definition, a small cemetery, with further licensed excavation required to establish its full extent. The trench was backfilled with sand, and markers were left in place to indicate where the remains lie.