The site, formerly occupying a garden to the rear of the old Bank of Ireland premises on the east side of Shop Street, accumulated a quiet but persistent local tradition: that an ancient clay burial urn had been unearthed here sometime in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, only to be lost or to crumble apart before it could be properly studied. The mound itself, variously described at the time as a tumulus or cairn, was reportedly removed at the moment of that discovery, leaving the tradition to float free of any physical anchor.

When a supermarket development was proposed for the site in 1979, a researcher named Rynne was brought in to investigate what remained. In the north-east corner of the garden stood a low, stony mound, irregular in plan and measuring roughly five metres east to west and two and a half metres north to south, with a tree growing from its top. Excavation settled the matter with some deflation: the feature turned out to be, in the words recorded at the time, merely a piece of nineteenth-century garden landscaping. No prehistoric burial, no urn, no ancient earthwork. Whatever had generated the original tradition, it was not this mound. The site is also associated with a feature known as the Chair of Tuam, and sits on or close to the location of a castle, suggesting that this small patch of town centre ground had accumulated layers of local significance long before anyone thought to dig into it.

Nothing survives above ground today. The car park offers no visible trace of the garden, the mound, or the investigation that quietly closed the case. What remains is the story itself, a good example of how urban archaeology often ends: not with revelation, but with the careful dismantling of a legend and the knowledge that the actual evidence, if it ever existed, is long gone.