At roughly 0.85 to 1 metre down, the spade met bone. What had begun as a hobby project became something considerably more unsettling: the lower half of a human skeleton, lying in thick, damp daub, with no coffin, no grave-cut, and no grave-goods to explain how it had come to be there.

The bones were brought to Mary Street Garda Station and examined by a pathologist at Barrington's Hospital, while the landowner, Pat Liddane, reported the find to the National Museum. An archaeologist named Patrick Wallace was sent to investigate, and the subsequent excavation uncovered the upper portion of the body that the original digging had missed. The remains lay fully extended on the back, aligned west to east, with the arms placed somewhat haphazardly to one side. The pathologist identified the individual as a young adult female. More striking still, the rib, arm, and cranial bones on the left-hand side appeared to have been burned. No explanation for this is recorded. Above the body, excavators recovered sherds of glazed and unglazed pottery, china, and a fragment of glass bottle. Crucially, none of the pottery pre-dates the thirteenth century, which gives a terminus ante quem, meaning the earliest possible date by which the burial must already have been made, pushing it to the medieval period at the latest. King's Island is the oldest part of Limerick, the core of the medieval Anglo-Norman city, so the ground here has form for concealing the unexpected.

Dalcassian House sits on King's Island, the roughly oval spit of land in the Shannon where Limerick's medieval streetplan still partially survives. The site is not publicly accessible, being private residential property, and there is nothing to mark the spot. The interest here is less in visiting than in knowing: that beneath a back garden, under soil disturbed only by someone chasing a hobby, lay a young woman placed without ceremony, burned in part, and left without so much as a pottery shard to date her until the earth above her was finally turned.