The bones, all from the upper body, were recovered from the north-west quadrant of a burnt pit, spread across two deposits roughly 0.3 metres apart. The pit itself was filled with soil containing charcoal and fragments of limestone, and the remains showed no sign of having been laid out in the usual manner of a formal interment.

The excavator, working under the direction of Ní Loingsigh, concluded that the bones had most likely been moved from somewhere else before ending up in the pit, disturbed at some point from an original burial place nearby and redeposited, possibly without any particular ceremony. Analysis of the man's teeth, who was probably over 45 years old at the time of death, suggested he may have belonged to the medieval period, or perhaps to an even earlier era. He was not alone in his broader landscape: a slab-lined burial, the kind in which a body is placed within a box-like arrangement of flat stones set into the ground, had been found in the 1920s approximately 700 metres to the south-south-west, hinting that the area around Grange held a more extensive history of funerary activity than the surface of an ordinary suburban site might suggest. The same 2003 excavation also uncovered eighteen additional pits and a second burnt pit, none of which have yet yielded a full explanation for the concentration of activity in this particular corner of Cork.