The burials at Holdenstown came to light in 2007 during archaeological work carried out ahead of the N9/N10 Kilcullen to Waterford road improvement scheme, and what emerged was a carefully arranged series of graves that had lain undisturbed within an ancient ceremonial landscape.

The excavation, conducted under Licence no. E3681, uncovered eight inhumation burials in total. Five of them lay within the southern half of a ring-ditch, a roughly circular ditched enclosure that typically marks a prehistoric burial monument. These five were aligned SW-NE, their feet pointing towards the north-east, a consistency that suggests deliberate, perhaps ritual, arrangement rather than casual interment. Three further burials were found within a larger enclosing feature that contained several ring-ditches nested within it. Two of these were lined with cobbles and oriented E-W, set 5.8 metres apart. A third lay near the southern edge of the enclosure in a poor state of preservation. The cobble-lining is a detail worth pausing on: the effort involved in preparing those grave cuts implies a degree of ceremony and, possibly, the marking of individuals whose burial warranted particular care. The relationship between the different alignments, SW-NE versus E-W, raises questions about chronology that the excavation alone cannot fully resolve; differing orientations sometimes reflect different periods of use at the same site.