Human bones came to light during the earthworks, most of them scattered and disturbed by the machinery before anyone could intervene. A handful of the remains, however, told a clearer story: they had been laid out in a supine position, flat on the back, and oriented east to west, at a depth of between 0.3 and 0.6 metres below the surface. That east-west alignment is a detail that recurs across early Christian burial sites throughout Ireland, reflecting the practice of burying the dead so that they would rise facing the rising sun at the resurrection.

The burial lay within a subrectangular enclosure, a roughly rectangular but slightly irregular enclosed area of the kind that in the Irish landscape often marks out an early ecclesiastical or settlement site. Such enclosures were sometimes used as burial grounds associated with early churches or monastic settlements, though without more controlled excavation it is difficult to say precisely what this one represents. The 1958 discovery was accidental, the kind that was far from uncommon in post-war Ireland when land improvement schemes and mechanised agriculture were reshaping the countryside at pace, and when the significance of what lay beneath the surface was not always recognised in time to preserve it.