When excavations took place in 2000 along Dominic Street, the remains were recorded carefully and left in situ, a decision reflecting the strong likelihood that they represent only the edge of a much larger burial area still underground. The orientation of the graves, running NW-SE, follows a pattern commonly associated with Christian interment, and their position in the shadow of St Dominic's friary church suggests they belong to a community of the dead that gathered, over generations, around a place of religious significance.

The excavation occupied a narrow but historically layered strip of ground: the friary church to the north, the town wall to the south, and Dominic Street to the west. A two-storey stone building still stands along the line of that former wall on the south-western side of a breach in it, a physical remnant of the town's medieval defences. The most southerly of the three burials had been cut through by a later ditch, identified as likely being a fosse, that is, a defensive ditch running alongside the town wall. This small detail reveals something telling about how the medieval built environment shifted and was reused over time: the dead, buried near a friary, were eventually crossed by the earthworks of a wall that cared nothing for what lay beneath.