It was not an ancient monument or a marked grave. It was simply a body, placed in the earth at some point between 1650 and 1950, and slowly being returned to the surface by the sea.

The initial discovery prompted a partial excavation of the exposed skull, but continued coastal erosion eventually made a full excavation necessary. What archaeologists uncovered was a single grave-cut, notably large, oriented northwest to southeast with the head placed at the northwestern end. The bones rested directly on bedrock at a depth of just over half a metre. Radiocarbon dating placed the burial somewhere in the broad range of AD 1650 to 1950, a span that prevents any certainty about the precise circumstances but does not prevent a reasonable conclusion. The individual was a young male, aged approximately 21 to 25, and the manner of burial, hurried, solitary, on a remote coastal edge, points strongly toward a shipwreck victim. The Hook Peninsula and the waters around it have a long and grim reputation for wrecks; the currents and rocks at the mouth of Waterford Harbour have ended countless voyages. Someone, at some unknown point in those three centuries, was pulled from the water or the shore and put into the ground as quickly and simply as the situation allowed. No coffin, no marker, no record.