The remains came to light in April 1988, when an Office of Public Works drainage team was working along a stretch of the Roosky River roughly 400 metres upstream from where it meets the Lung River, the two watercourses running at roughly perpendicular angles to one another through this part of County Roscommon.

Nessa O'Connor of the National Museum of Ireland was called in to investigate, but the original circumstances of the burial, or burials, could not be established. River dredging is particularly unforgiving in this regard: machinery designed to clear and deepen channels is not well suited to preserving the spatial relationships between bones that an archaeologist would rely upon to understand how, when, or why a body was placed somewhere. Whether the remains had entered the river through erosion of a nearby burial site, or had been deposited in the water deliberately at some point in the past, was simply impossible to determine. The bones were subsequently acquired by the National Museum, where they remain catalogued but contextually opaque.