A dumper truck reversing across a quarry field in Kildare is not, on the face of it, the kind of machinery one associates with the recovery of medieval burials. Yet it was precisely this that, in the spring of 2000, dislodged the second of several skeletons from a field at Graney East, about 3.7 kilometres south-west of Castledermot, and set in motion a more systematic investigation of what lay beneath. What emerged was a small but layered burial ground, tucked into a natural sand-filled depression at the highest point of the site, its presence entirely invisible from the surface.

The area around this field is unusually dense with traces of earlier occupation. A nunnery founded around 1200 for nuns of the Arrouaisians, a reformed Augustinian order that spread widely through Ireland in the twelfth century, once occupied the western part of the same field. It was recognised as an abbey by 1476 and suppressed in 1539, and its remains survive today as low earthworks and wall fragments, along with a dry but largely intact mill-race that once fed a mill documented as early as the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656. The mill ruins themselves contain a date stone of 1799, though the lower courses of an earlier structure are visible within the standing walls, with the foundation courses of an even older building projecting from the north side. Monitoring of the quarry site began in February 1999 and initially produced only sherds of medieval and post-medieval pottery. It was during a second phase of topsoil-stripping in July 1999 that the first skeleton appeared: a woman in her late twenties or early thirties, lying in an extended position with her legs flexed, orientated east-west with the skull to the west. No clear grave-cut could be identified in the sandy gravel. A second woman, middle-aged, was found the following year, and a group of additional burials was then located roughly 25 metres to the north-north-east. The full burial area measured approximately 11.8 metres by 9.6 metres. The layered arrangement of the bones and evidence of disturbance and disarticulation among some individuals suggested a graveyard used over an extended period rather than a single event. Whether these burials are connected to the nearby nunnery remains an open question; the formal graveyard associated with the abbey has not been identified on the ground.