The site had no visible surface trace, no enclosing wall or earthwork, nothing to suggest that the ground had once served as an organised place of burial. It came to light only because the machinery reached it.

The Office of Public Works funded a rescue excavation, carried out by James Eogan over two weeks in April and May 1995, once it became clear that quarrying would continue. Within a cutting of roughly six by seven metres, two rows of graves emerged: six individuals in the eastern row, eight in the western. Nearly all had been laid with their heads to the west, the standard orientation associated with early Christian burial practice in Ireland. Most were extended supine inhumations, meaning the body was placed flat on its back, though two were flexed burials, the body drawn up rather than stretched out, and one may have been placed face down. The underlying deposits were fluvio-glacial, the stony legacy of retreating ice sheets, and this geology gave several graves the appearance of stone-lined pits, though only a single infant burial in the western row could be confirmed as genuinely stone-lined. One adult in the eastern row had a stone placed on either side of the skull, a feature sometimes called a pillow stone or ear muff arrangement. The only object recovered in association with a burial was a small bronze annular ring, just seventeen millimetres in external diameter, found beside the femur of one of the eastern burials. Radiocarbon dating of two samples by the Oxford University Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit placed the cemetery in use from the mid-sixth to the early ninth century, a span of roughly two to three hundred years during the early medieval period in Ireland.

The full extent of the cemetery remains unknown. Quarry workers reported that burials had already been disturbed before the archaeologists arrived, and a test trench dug ten metres to the west of the main cutting uncovered at least two further articulated skeletons. There were also at least five instances within the excavated area where a later burial had cut into an earlier one, and in two of those cases the disturbed bones had been gathered and placed carefully at the feet of the more recent interment. That small, deliberate gesture is perhaps the most telling detail to survive: a community that had been burying its dead here across generations, attentive enough to the earlier occupants of the ground to treat their displaced remains with some measure of respect.