Somewhere beneath the sandy contours of Collaghknock Glebe, a woman was buried without ceremony, without grave goods, and without the protection of a stone cist or wooden coffin. She was found just over half a metre below the surface, lying in a natural sand hill, the kind of glacially deposited ridge known as an esker, which threads its way across the Irish midlands. What makes her presence quietly unsettling is not the strangeness of the location but the absence of everything else.

The burial was recorded by Lucas in 1969, and the details are spare. The skeleton belonged to an adult female, orientated southwest to northeast, with the skull placed at the southwestern end. That orientation is notable: early Christian burials in Ireland were typically laid out east to west, with the head to the west, so the deceased could rise facing east on the day of judgement. A southwest to northeast alignment sits outside that convention, though without additional evidence it is impossible to say with confidence what period this burial belongs to, or what tradition, if any, governed it. No grave goods were found alongside her, which removes another potential route toward dating or interpretation. The esker itself, a natural feature rather than a constructed monument, appears simply to have served as convenient, well-drained ground.