What nobody had anticipated was a cemetery, previously unrecorded, its existence erased so thoroughly from local memory that no documentary source had ever mentioned it. The burials came to light almost incidentally, exposed during a trial-cutting opened to follow the line of the town wall southward, and what began as three skeletons quickly suggested something far larger lying just beyond the trench edge.

The excavation, directed by Kenneth Hanley under licence 96E0334 and running from October 1996 to July 1997, was undertaken in advance of the Northern Relief Road connecting Athlunkard Street to a proposed new bridge over the Abbey River. The south-east corner of King's Island is clearly shown on Hardiman's map of Limerick dating to around 1590, which marks the priory of the Fratres Cruciferi, a house of Crutched Friars, a mendicant order who wore a cross on their habit, recorded in the Irish Pipe Rolls as early as 1211 to 1212 and dissolved in 1537, after which it was partly converted into a fish-house. The cemetery emerged in Cutting 3, the southernmost of the three excavation areas. A large east-west limestone wall appeared to delimit the burial ground to the north, with no burials found beyond it in that direction, and the medieval town wall abutted this same structure from the north. In all, 31 burials, including partial remains, were excavated. Given the density observed in a narrow seven-metre trial-trench, archaeologists estimated the full cemetery could hold between 100 and 200 individuals. The eastern portion had been heavily disturbed by post-medieval activity, and the southern and eastern extents were never established, running beyond the limits of the cutting. A wall with a triple row of stake-holes leading westward was also identified; its function and precise date remain unknown, though it is thought to be medieval.

The site today lies beneath the raised roadway of the Northern Relief Road, which was specifically designed to pass over rather than through the archaeology, allowing the unexcavated portions to remain undisturbed below the carriageway. The area around Sir Harry's Mall and Fish Lane is accessible on foot, though there is nothing visible at ground level to indicate what lies beneath. Sir Harry's Mall itself takes its name from Sir Harry Hartstonge, who built a terrace of six Georgian houses along the newly constructed street around 1779, deliberately siting them outside the town wall to avoid corporation taxes. Those houses, abandoned within about 80 to 85 years and gone by 1870, left their own archaeological traces immediately above the medieval layers. For anyone walking the quayside here, the ground underfoot holds considerably more than it reveals.