What began as the detection of a handful of human remains quickly expanded into the discovery of at least 57 skeletons, lying quietly beneath a field in County Galway, largely unknown and unrecorded until machinery came within reach of them.

Full excavation was carried out over July and August 2004. The skeletons were found in varying states of preservation, those closer to the surface having been disturbed, probably by centuries of agricultural activity, leaving many only partially intact. The burial rite itself was consistent and deliberate: the bodies had been laid supine, oriented east to west in the Christian manner, with no grave goods, no shrouding, and no coffins. Grave-cuts, where they could still be read in the soil, were tight around the skeletons, suggesting little ceremony beyond the burial itself. One of the more telling features of the site was a curving ditch running along the eastern edge of the burials, roughly two metres wide at the surface and over a metre deep. This kind of enclosing boundary is a recognised characteristic of Early Christian burial grounds in Ireland, where a defined enclosure, sometimes circular or curving, set the sacred space apart from the surrounding landscape. The combination of the east-west orientation, the absence of grave goods, and this substantial enclosing feature points strongly toward an Early Christian date, though osteological analysis and radiocarbon dating were still under way at the time the excavation was formally reported, and the precise origins of the graveyard remained open.