The bones, when excavated in July 1990, were disarticulated and broken, and had been arranged into neat stacks with skulls placed close by. This was not how any of these individuals had originally been buried. Whatever happened to them, and wherever they first lay, someone at some point had gathered their remains and sorted them deliberately.

The excavation was carried out by Stella Cherry of the National Museum of Ireland. The condition of the bones ruled out any straightforward interpretation: there was no delimiting pit, no clear grave cut, and no evidence of a formal burial arrangement. The most telling contextual detail may come not from the bones themselves but from a map. The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map records this area under the name 'Gallows Green', a designation that persisted until at least the latter half of the nineteenth century. Gallows greens, as the name suggests, were execution sites, typically located on the margins of towns and cities, and their associated ground often accumulated the bodies or remains of those hanged there over many years. The stacking of the bones, the broken condition of many, and the absence of any formal grave structure are consistent with remains that were moved, consolidated, or disturbed long after their original deposition. The site and its finds were published by M. Cahill and M. Sikora in 2011, as part of a broader study of burial excavations carried out by the National Museum of Ireland between 1927 and 2006.