Not a burial in any conventional sense, it belongs instead to a category of find that recurs throughout Irish archaeology with quiet regularity: human remains pulled from waterways, bogs, and lakeshores, stripped of the context that might explain them.

The skull came to light during dredging operations on the Owenur River, a west-to-east flowing watercourse in County Roscommon, at a point roughly 200 metres upstream from where the river feeds into Cloonahee Lough. No other skeletal remains were found alongside it, and no artefacts were recovered that might suggest a date or a cause. The find is noted by Sikora and Cahill in their 2011 survey of such discoveries. Without associated material, the skull resists easy interpretation. It could represent a formal deposition, the deliberate placing of human remains in or near water as part of a ritual practice documented across prehistoric and early medieval Ireland. It could equally be the result of riverbank erosion disturbing a nearby grave, or something altogether more difficult to categorise. The absence of evidence is, in its own way, the defining feature of the find.