They came to light not through archaeological investigation but through a bulldozer, in the course of land improvement works in 1950.

The site sits within a bivallate enclosure, meaning a roughly circular enclosure defined by two concentric banks and ditches, a form of field monument found widely across Ireland and associated variously with early medieval settlement or earlier ritual use. During Land Project works in the summer of 1950, the inner bank of this enclosure was being levelled when the human remains were disturbed. A contemporary account noted that the bones and skulls lay in different positions, as if buried where the individuals had fallen, suggesting an informal or hurried interment rather than a formally organised burial. The bulldozer crushed and crumbled much of the material before the discovery could be properly assessed; workmen gathered what undamaged bones remained and re-interred them together in a single spot. Local tradition offered one explanation for who these people might have been: famine victims, recovered from the adjacent public road and buried where they could be. This was recorded in correspondence from October 1950, two months after the initial discovery, suggesting the possibility circulated and persisted in local memory even after the bones themselves had been reburied.