The story of how they came to be there twice over is the kind of accidental archaeology that rarely makes it into textbooks.

The original discovery happened during quarrying operations sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s, when workers cutting into a gravel pit turned up the skeletons of around forty people and, notably, a horse. The burials were extended, meaning the bodies had been laid out flat rather than crouched, and were oriented east to west, an arrangement commonly associated with early Christian burial practice in Ireland. They lay only about a foot and a half below the surface. The same pit also produced a furnace bottom, a dense slag-like residue left by smelting or metalworking, held at University College Cork. Separately, a cist burial was found in the same pit; a cist is a small stone-lined grave of a type more often associated with Bronze Age interment. The landowner had the bones reinterred in the north-west corner of the field, but subsequent ploughing in the adjacent ground kept turning up further remains, which were buried under a tree and in the front lawn of the house. The site has never been formally excavated in the conventional sense, and much of what is known comes from the landowner's own account.