Skulls were hauled away mixed in with road material, and the local men doing the hauling thought little of it. One man told a visiting antiquarian that he had regularly carried off two or three skulls in a single horse load of gravel.

The account comes from James Graves, writing in 1852 to 1853, who visited the site after quarrying had already removed much of the monument. The townland name, Rathmoyle, preserves the memory of a rath, the circular enclosing bank typical of early medieval Ireland, that had once sat on the ridge's highest point. Graves concluded, however, that despite the name and the shape, this was no defensive or military structure. What the quarry section revealed was a cemetery. Skeletons lay oriented with heads to the east and feet to the west, the Christian burial custom, without coffins, stone-lined graves, or any grave goods whatsoever. No weapons, no ornaments, nothing personal. A Dr. Crane, who examined bones that Graves brought to him, found that most appeared to have belonged to people aged around fifty, judging by their teeth; a few bones seemed to come from a sheep. Separately, a pit roughly five feet deep and ten to twelve feet across was visible in the quarry face, its outline traced by a distinct band of charcoal, calcined bone, and what Graves described as clinkers or slag, suggesting an earlier phase of activity involving burning. The earthwork was most likely a barrow, a burial mound, rather than a rath; the two forms can look similar once reduced by time and quarrying, and the enclosing bank would have been consistent with either. On the first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1839, a quarry of around eighty-five metres in diameter is marked at precisely the ridge's highest point, with a limekiln, used for burning limestone to produce agricultural lime, immediately to the south. That quarry almost certainly consumed whatever remained of the monument and the burials within it.