A cemetery holding the remains of at least 55 people lay completely unknown beneath a field in County Kildare until a housing development brought it to light. It had left no trace above ground, no headstones, no enclosing wall, no local memory, nothing to suggest that several dozen individuals had been carefully laid out there, probably more than a thousand years ago.

In 2004, archaeological test trenching carried out by C. Duffy under Excavation Licence No. 04E0644, followed by monitored topsoil-stripping across the development area, revealed the burial ground on a very slight natural rise in the landscape. The graves were arranged in six rows within a roughly rectangular area measuring 14 metres east to west and 6.5 metres north to south, with two juvenile burials set slightly apart to the north of the main group. The pits themselves were simple and unlined, cut down through an upper stone-free subsoil and into a lower stony clay layer that formed the base of each grave. All but two of the burials were oriented east to west, the alignment conventional in Early Christian burial practice, where the dead were laid with their heads to the west so as to face east, towards the rising sun and the resurrection. A few graves had small stone slabs placed at their sides or laid over the remains. No artefacts of any kind were recovered, which is itself typical of Early Christian cemeteries in Ireland, where grave goods were generally absent. The evidence points to this being a genuinely unrecorded early medieval burial ground, one that had survived entirely beneath the surface without any documentary or physical trace until excavation. Roughly 100 metres to the south-east, the same investigation also uncovered two bowl furnaces, small bowl-shaped hearths used in metalworking or smelting, hinting at some form of activity in the wider area during what may be a broadly similar period. Among the 55 or more individuals represented, some remains were disarticulated or disturbed by later grave-cuts, indicating that the cemetery was used over a period of time long enough for earlier burials to have been partly forgotten.