Digging for gravel close to the bawn wall, the defensive enclosure that surrounds many Irish tower houses, they turned up a quantity of human skeletons. It was not an isolated discovery. Writing in the 1880s, the historian Wright noted that bones had been coming to light all around the castle for some time, and that a grove on the other side of the road had yielded further skeletal remains.

Foulksrath is a medieval tower house of considerable age, and the landscape around it appears to carry a long history of burial that has never been fully explained or excavated in any systematic way. The casual, repeated nature of the finds, skeletons surfacing during routine agricultural work rather than through any deliberate investigation, suggests a substantial and probably early burial ground whose extent was never formally mapped. Whether the dead belonged to a medieval community associated with the castle, or to an earlier population entirely, the available record does not say.