Behind the Convent of Mercy on Sallins Road in Naas, inside what appears to be an ordinary walled garden, the ground holds the remains of at least ten people buried in careful alignment, their heads pointing south-southwest, their graves shallow and spaced roughly a metre apart. The discovery was made not through chance but through formal archaeological testing, and what the excavators found raises more questions than it resolves. The bodies appear to occupy only a single layer, and the testing was limited enough that none of the burials were fully exposed, meaning the true extent of the cemetery beneath that garden remains unknown.

The convent itself was constructed in the 1820s and 1830s, and the stratigraphy of the surrounding ground, layers of backfill and redeposited soil, reflects that building period. The burials, however, may predate this activity or belong to it; the archaeological record does not settle the question. One burial, designated Burial No. 1, showed faint wood staining around its edges, the ghostly chemical trace left when timber decays into the surrounding soil, suggesting the person had been interred in a coffin. An iron nail found near the skull supports that interpretation. The remaining skeletons showed no such evidence, and their alignment, north-northeast to south-southwest with the head at the southern end, is a recognised pattern in Christian burial practice, though an uncommon variation on the more standard east-west orientation. The northern part of the garden, by contrast, yielded nothing of archaeological note, and trenches dug to the front of the convent and beside the church were equally quiet.