The discovery was made during groundworks at Number 48 Barrack Street, a building that most recently housed a public house known as Nancy Spain's, which was being demolished to make way for a social housing scheme. The remains came to light just below construction formation level, first as two fragmentary and partially articulated adult male skeletons with no identifiable grave cut, found against the party wall with the neighbouring property. These were unsettling enough. What lay five metres to the east-northeast was more so.

Further excavation revealed a shallow mass burial pit, orientated northeast to southwest and measuring 2.25 metres long, less than a metre wide, and only 0.27 metres deep at its maximum. The pit sat so close to the former pub's north-eastern gable wall foundation that barely 32 centimetres separated the two. Inside were four largely intact individuals, arranged head to toe in a sequence that left little room for ambiguity about the conditions of their death: the positioning of the remains indicated that all four had their hands or wrists bound behind their backs, with their ankles likely bound as well. The pit had been backfilled with a mixed silty clay containing material ranging in date from the medieval to the modern periods, suggesting the ground in this part of Barrack Street had been disturbed and reused across many centuries. The upper fill had seen more recent disturbance too, which is perhaps unsurprising given that a pub had been standing over it. Who these individuals were, when exactly they were placed in the ground, and under what circumstances, remains unknown. Barrack Street takes its name from the military barracks that once dominated the area, and the street has a long history of occupation on the southern margins of the old city, but the burial pit predates any firm archival trail that might explain it. The bound posture points towards execution or summary killing of some kind, though the precise historical moment is unrecovered.