When a bulldozer broke ground near Clane in County Kildare in 1971, it exposed something that had been undisturbed for thousands of years: a small Neolithic cemetery arranged on the crest of a low escarpment, positioned to overlook a glacial overflow channel, the kind of ancient drainage feature carved into the landscape by meltwater at the end of the last ice age. That a community chose this particular elevated spot to bury their dead suggests the place held some significance, though what that significance was remains beyond recovery.

The cemetery, documented by Ryan and published in 1979 to 1980, consisted of at least three burials, one of which had been destroyed by machinery a year before the others were properly examined. What survived was carefully recorded. In an oval pit, archaeologists found the crouched inhumation of a child of around eleven years old alongside that of a fifteen-year-old youth; crouched inhumation, a common Neolithic burial practice, involves placing the body in a foetal position before interment. The youth was accompanied by a fragment of a lignite bracelet and sherds of a round-bottomed decorated bowl, the kind of pottery associated with early Neolithic communities in Ireland. Lignite, a soft brownish coal, was worked into ornamental objects during this period, and even a small fragment of such a bracelet points to craft traditions and perhaps personal identity or status. A second pit held the crouched inhumation of an adult male and the remains of another adult, though that second individual had been disturbed before a full examination could take place. Four individuals at minimum, two of them children, buried together on a ridge above an ancient waterway.