Ireland was never conquered by Rome, which makes any Roman artefact found here something of a puzzle, and the coins from this burial site push that puzzle in an intriguing direction. The bones themselves did not survive long after excavation, crumbling on exposure to the air, leaving the coins as the most tangible evidence that something deliberate and carefully furnished had once been placed in the ground.

Two of the coins have been identified with some precision. One belonged to the reign of the Emperor Trajan, who ruled from AD 97 to 117, and another to Hadrian, whose reign ran from AD 117 to 138. These are inhumation burials, meaning the dead were laid out whole rather than cremated, a practice common across the Roman world and among its neighbours. The presence of Roman coinage does not necessarily mean Romans were buried here. By the second century AD, Roman goods circulated well beyond the empire's frontiers through trade, gift exchange, and contact along the Irish Sea routes. Coins sometimes served a ritual function in burial across the ancient world, placed with the dead as offerings or tokens. Whether that was the intention here, the record does not say, but the combination of formal burial and imperial coinage, this close to the shore, points to a community that was not entirely cut off from the wider world of Roman Britain just across the water.