In 1966, a builder broke ground for an ordinary new house on a level field at Kilbelin in County Kildare and found that the earth was already occupied. Construction work turned up a cluster of inhumation burials, that is, the remains of individuals buried whole rather than cremated, lying in unlined graves cut into the gravelly subsoil. There were no coffins, no stone-lined chambers, nothing to mark these graves from above or protect them below. The site gave no outward indication that anything lay beneath it.

The National Museum of Ireland was notified and a limited rescue excavation followed, uncovering fragments of four human skulls. The individuals represented a range of ages and circumstances: an adult male, an elderly person whose sex could not be determined, a juvenile of unknown sex, and an infant under one year old. The graves were narrow, roughly 0.3 to 0.45 metres wide at the base and opening to around 0.8 metres at the top, and were dug to a depth of between 0.78 and 0.9 metres. No grave goods of any kind were recovered alongside the remains, which makes precise dating difficult without further analysis. Because the excavation was necessarily constrained by the circumstances of the discovery, it covered only a portion of the area, and the possibility that further burials remain in the vicinity has never been ruled out. A field that appeared entirely unremarkable had quietly preserved, at minimum, four lives spanning infancy to old age.