The discovery halted the work almost immediately, and what had been treated as a routine infrastructure job became something rather more complicated. The site, in the townland of Aghanashanamore, had no marking on Ordnance Survey maps, and nobody was entirely sure what they were dealing with.

At a depth of between 0.3 and 0.45 metres, two or three skeletons were uncovered. The remains were described at the time as belonging to young men, and notably the teeth were in good condition, though no formal excavation followed and the bones were not taken into state custody. The site itself, only 8 metres in overall diameter, had been recorded as a ringfort, which is a type of enclosed farmstead common across early medieval Ireland, typically circular and defined by an earthen bank. But a sketch and accompanying notes provided by Bart Bambury of the ESB to Marcus Ó hEochaidhe of the National Monuments Service suggested a different reading: the dimensions and profile pointed instead to a mound barrow, a prehistoric burial monument raised over the dead. A barrow and a ringfort can look similar on the surface, especially when much reduced by centuries of agriculture, but they belong to entirely different worlds, one prehistoric and funerary, the other early medieval and domestic. The distinction matters, and in this case it was never resolved. No official investigation was carried out, and the exact whereabouts of the remains afterwards is simply not known.