In 1957, a land reclamation project at Kilmoney in County Kildare disturbed something that had been quietly sitting beneath a small cairn, a low mound of heaped stones that can mark anything from an ancient burial to a field clearance. Workers removing the stones came across what were described simply as bones. The bones were reburied, which was not an unusual response at the time, but the disturbance prompted a subsequent archaeological inspection that produced a more complicated picture than the original discovery had suggested.

What the inspection recorded was a mixture that resists easy interpretation. There were animal bones, and then, more cautiously noted, possibly one or two human teeth. Alongside these were sherds of 17th-century glazed earthenware pottery and a glass bottle. The pottery alone shifts the likely date of whatever activity created this deposit into the early modern period, long after the kinds of prehistoric or early medieval burials more commonly associated with cairns. Whether the cairn itself predates the 17th-century material, or whether the whole deposit belongs to that later period, the available evidence does not settle. The hedged language around the human remains, "possibly one or two human teeth", suggests the inspection could not be definitive, and the mixture of domestic pottery with what might be human bone makes the site's original function genuinely unclear.