Just thirty centimetres below the surface, they found human remains belonging to a number of individuals, brought to light not by excavation but by the ordinary machinery of the sand trade.

At least one of the burials was extended and oriented east to west, a arrangement commonly associated with Christian burial practice, in which the body is laid out so that the deceased faces east towards the rising sun. Local tradition holds that the area served as a burial ground attached to a workhouse in the nineteenth century. If that is correct, the dead at Leggetsrath would belong to the period of the Great Famine and its aftermath, when workhouses across Ireland became overwhelmed and their associated graveyards filled rapidly, often with the poorest and most vulnerable of the population. Such burial grounds were rarely marked or maintained, and many have slipped from memory or record entirely, leaving their occupants undisturbed until chance intervenes, as it did here with a sandpit and a mechanical digger.