In 1992, a routine sewerage scheme along Boherboy, the town's principal thoroughfare, broke open the ground and revealed human remains lying disturbed on the footpath, the bones and surrounding soil exposed by mechanical excavation directly opposite the old Augustinian Abbey. What the pipe-layers had cut through was, in all likelihood, a graveyard that once served the abbey, now buried quietly beneath the road surface and footpath of a functioning town centre.

The discovery was reported to the National Museum of Ireland, and an investigation was carried out by Celie O'Rahilly, an archaeologist with Limerick Corporation. The human remains were subsequently examined by Barra Ó Donnabháin. The pipe trench, measuring roughly 0.7 metres east to west and 1.2 metres north to south, had cut into hard, dark orange natural clay at a depth of around 0.55 metres. At the base of the cut, just above bedrock, lay an articulated skeleton, meaning the bones were still in their original anatomical positions, indicating the body had not been significantly disturbed before the excavation. The burial was aligned west to east, with the skull to the west, a configuration broadly consistent with Christian funerary practice. The remains belonged to an adult female, estimated to have been between twenty-five and thirty-five years old at the time of death. No artefacts were recovered from the grave, and in the absence of any datable material, the burial remains chronologically unassigned. The grave-pit itself extended beneath the road, meaning a further portion of the burial likely remains undisturbed underneath the tarmac.

Boherboy runs through the centre of Rathkeale, and the site lies in the townland of Abbeylands, close to the grounds of the Augustinian Abbey, an Augustinian friary whose remains are still visible in the town. There is nothing to mark the spot where the bones were found; the footpath and road have long since been reinstated. The interest here is less in what can be seen and more in what the episode reveals about the archaeology of Irish towns generally, where medieval burial grounds, once associated with religious houses, frequently extend beyond their visible boundaries and survive, unrecognised, beneath ordinary streets.