At Kilderry in County Kilkenny, on the western crest of a small river valley where grasslands open out to the east, a wide and deep trench once yielded exactly that kind of unsettling discovery, a square area of roughly a quarter of an acre, cut into the ground beside Kilderry House, from which human remains were unearthed.

The detail comes from O'Kelly, writing in 1969, and the ambiguity he recorded has not really been resolved since. Close by sits a much denuded polygonal enclosure, its original form now heavily worn down, alongside a church and an associated graveyard. A polygonal enclosure of this kind, a roughly multi-sided bounded area, often signals early ecclesiastical or ceremonial activity in the Irish landscape, though whether the burials here belong to that enclosure or to the adjacent graveyard remains an open question. The site occupies a position with good views in all directions, the kind of elevated, legible spot that tended to attract settlement, ritual, or both across many centuries of Irish prehistory and early Christianity. What the trench represents, whether organised burial ground, an older funerary feature, or something else entirely, is precisely the sort of thing the archaeological record notes but cannot yet settle.