The find was unremarkable in appearance, the kind of thing that might easily have been passed over, but it turned out to represent two people separated by centuries from anyone who knew their names.

Analysis carried out for the National Museum of Ireland established that the remains belonged to two individuals: an older adult male and a single bone from an infant. The bones had soil matrix still adhering to them, indicating they had been genuinely interred rather than deposited on the surface, and a pig's tooth was recovered alongside them. Radiocarbon dating placed the burial within the period AD 997 to 1162, with the most probable range refined to AD 1011 to 1162, according to Andrew Halpin of the National Museum. That window makes these individuals roughly contemporary with Hiberno-Norse Dublin, the hybrid Norse and Irish settlement that preceded the Anglo-Norman city and which lay nearby. The Hiberno-Norse period, roughly the tenth to twelfth centuries, was one of considerable cultural mixing in the Dublin area, and informal or outlying burials from this era are not unknown, though they remain poorly understood. What the pig's tooth signifies in this context is unclear; animal remains are occasionally found in early medieval burial contexts but their meaning is debated. Perhaps more striking still is a detail supplied by local park rangers: a child's burial had reportedly been discovered at the same spot some thirty years before the 2016 find, suggesting the location may have served as an informal or unofficial burial ground over a considerable period.

The site sits within a public park, and the bones came to light through entirely ordinary means, an animal disturbing the ground rather than any planned excavation. Visitors to the area are unlikely to see anything that marks the spot today. The significance lies less in what is visible than in what the ground quietly held for the better part of a millennium before a burrowing animal changed that.