There is nothing to see from the surface, no marker, no enclosure, no sign of what lies beneath. It is the kind of site that announces itself only when someone, by chance or misfortune, disturbs the soil.

The story begins in 1937, when a Garda Sergeant at Blanchardstown reported the discovery of a skeleton and two skulls in a field near the Tolka to the National Museum of Ireland. The following year, the Museum led a formal excavation of the site. Working through roughly one third of the total area, archaeologists uncovered the remains of men, women, and children, close to four hundred individuals in all. Alongside the skeletons they found blue and white glass beads, a lignite ring, bronze pins, flint arrowheads, and various iron objects. Most significantly, a silver coin of Eadgar of England, dated to AD 967, was recovered among the finds. Eadgar, who ruled England from 959 until his death in 975, is associated with a coinage reform that produced well-documented coin types, and the presence of one here places the burial ground firmly in use during the tenth century. The mix of grave goods, spanning materials from flint to iron and personal ornaments in glass and lignite, a hard black mineral sometimes carved into jewellery, points to a community burying its dead over some period of time rather than a single catastrophic event.

The site today shows none of its history. It sits as ordinary pastureland, and two thirds of the burial ground was never excavated, meaning a substantial portion of those interred remains in the earth. The 1938 OS map is the most useful guide to its general location, placing it adjacent to the River Road cottages on the Castleknock side of the Tolka. There is no public access infrastructure, and visitors approaching the area should bear in mind that it is agricultural land. The site's records are held within the National Museum of Ireland's topographical files, which remain the primary source for anyone wishing to understand what was found here and what, in all likelihood, still remains.