They shift, erode, and occasionally give up what they have been keeping. At Ballyeagh in County Kerry, it was children who made the discovery, stumbling across a human skeleton edging its way out through the face of a partly eroded dune in July 1979. What they had found was a lintel grave, a type of burial in which flat stones are laid across the top of a roughly rectangular pit to form a roof over the body inside, sometimes called a cist. The skeleton lay at a depth of around 0.9 metres below the original ground level, suggesting it had been deliberately and carefully interred, though the slow movement of the sand above had begun to undo centuries of concealment.

Lintel graves and cists of this kind are found across Ireland and tend to be associated with prehistoric burial practices, though the form persisted in some areas into the early medieval period. The sandy ground along this stretch of the Kerry coast has preserved remains that heavier, wetter soils might long since have destroyed. The find at Ballyeagh is recorded in the wider survey literature on Kerry burials, and its accidental discovery by children rather than by archaeologists is a reminder of how much remains undetected beneath the coastal dunes, waiting for the wind or the tide to make the next move.