In 1971, quarrying at Sheastown in County Kilkenny broke into something considerably older than gravel: human bone, scattered across an area roughly 35 by 50 metres. What emerged, once archaeologists began to excavate, was a small early medieval cemetery that had lain undisturbed in the slope of the hillside, facing east across the river, for well over a thousand years.

Four graves were properly excavated, each a shallow, unlined pit cut into the surface of the gravel deposit. The burials followed the extended inhumation rite common in early Christian Ireland, with each body laid out flat and the graves oriented east to west, a practice generally associated with Christian belief in bodily resurrection toward the rising sun. Alongside the disarticulated bones of additional individuals found in several of the pits, the remains represented at least four males and two females in total. One of the male graves contained a small tanged iron knife, a type with a projecting tang fitted into a handle, found beside the left femur with finger bones close by, suggesting the knife had been held or worn at the hip. Radiocarbon dating placed the burials within the period AD 413 to 561, situating them in the post-Roman centuries when Christianity was spreading across Ireland and small rural cemeteries of this kind were being established outside the reach of any formal ecclesiastical infrastructure.