There was no coffin, no shroud, no grave-goods of any kind. The body had been placed on its left side with the right arm extended behind the spine, the ribcage exposed vertically, and the grave-cut itself measured only around 1.12 metres. Everything about the deposition suggests urgency, someone buried quickly, without the usual rituals or materials, in ground that was already close to being forgotten.

The discovery was made during topsoil-stripping for the Bord Gáis Éireann Pipeline to the West, excavated by archaeologist Brian Halpin under licence 02E0811. The work exposed a cluster of pits and cut features in the townland of Curraheen South, Co. Limerick. Most of these turned out to be post-medieval refuse pits, U-shaped in profile with gradually sloping sides reaching down to the water table, and containing fragments of porcelain, animal bone, and two horseshoes. Ordinary domestic debris, in other words, from a working agricultural settlement. The skeleton was found 8.5 metres north of this main cluster, partially exposed, the skull largely absent, though the rest of the bones were recovered in a reasonable state of preservation despite being brittle with age. Local knowledge of the field holds that the site was abandoned in the aftermath of the Famine, and the archaeologists noted that the post-medieval date of the associated features, combined with that local memory, points towards the possibility that this was the grave of a Famine victim. A young person, buried alone, in ground that no longer had anyone left to tend it.

There is no formal visitor access to the site, and the landscape itself, described in the excavation report as an abandoned agricultural settlement of post-medieval and modern date, gives little away to the casual eye. The record is held on excavations.ie, where Halpin's report was compiled by Denis Power and uploaded in August 2012. For anyone tracing Famine-era sites across the Irish midlands and west, this one carries a particular weight precisely because of its plainness: no monument, no marker, just a shallow cut in the earth and what it quietly contains.