The location did not match where the dead were supposed to be.

The graveyard in question belongs to the Roman Catholic church, which occupies a restored Cistercian abbey church, a medieval monastic building that was adapted for Catholic parish use following emancipation. The official medieval burial ground associated with the abbey is recorded as lying to its south-east, yet the 2001 excavation, carried out under licence 01E0949, uncovered approximately fifteen sets of adult remains along with displaced bone in Chapel Street, consistent with a site that had been used for successive burials over a long period. In places, the dead had been laid two or three deep, with simple grave-cuts, the basic rectangular trenches dug to receive individual burials, still legible in the soil. What gives the site an additional layer of interest is that these were not the first such discoveries in the area. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, road repairs and widening schemes at the junction of Chapel Street and Barrow Lane had been turning up human remains with some regularity. The 2001 works simply brought more systematic scrutiny to a pattern that local memory and earlier contractors had already, in a quieter way, registered.