The site at Stradbally North had long been designated in the national record as a burial ground, but the scale and character of what lay beneath the surface, including human remains mixed with animal bone, charcoal deposits, and the unsettling suggestion of hurried interment, gave the place a particular weight that bureaucratic classification had not quite conveyed.

The testing, carried out under licence 03E0214, involved eight trenches and followed earlier investigations from 1974 and a 1990 dig by Brian Hodkinson. It was Frank Coyne who subsequently led the full excavation, recovering the remains of at least thirteen individuals. Ten were articulated skeletons, meaning the bones were still in roughly their original anatomical positions, suggesting the bodies had not been disturbed since burial. At least three further individuals were represented only by disarticulated bone. The group comprised six male adults, three female adults, and one juvenile. One young male had sustained a fracture to the right femur close to the time of death; a female adult showed evidence of spinal disease. Several of the burials retained traces of funerary preparation: one individual appeared to have been wrapped in a winding sheet, a length of cloth wound around the body, whilst others had been placed in shrouds secured at the hands and feet. The general orientation of the graves was north-east to south-west, a pattern broadly consistent with Christian burial practice. No church structure was found on site, but the road immediately to the west carries the name Chapel Hill, and local tradition holds that a church once stood at the site of the nearby old schoolhouse. Among sixteen recovered finds were a fifteenth-century silver penny, iron and copper alloy belt buckles, a bronze mount with gold gilt, and two fragments of post-medieval pottery.

The site sits within the townland of Stradbally North on the edge of Castleconnell, a small village on the Shannon in east County Limerick. There is no formal public access to the excavated area, which has since been developed for housing. The finds and records are accessible through the excavations.ie database under licence number 03E0214, where the full excavation report is lodged. For those interested in the landscape context, Chapel Hill itself is a quiet local road, and the general area retains the kind of layered, unremarked quality that tends to accompany places where the ground has proved, unexpectedly, to hold more than anyone anticipated.