That it turned out to be one fragment of a much larger buried community, sitting quietly beneath the soil of County Dublin's Windmill Lands beside the Ward river, makes it stranger still. What the eroding bank eventually revealed was not an isolated interment but a cemetery of sorts, interleaved with a substantial midden, the term used for an accumulated deposit of domestic or communal waste, stretching for at least forty metres along the waterline.

The skull first came to light in 1999, and subsequent investigation by Brady and Kelleher uncovered the articulated remains of six individuals, their graves associated with pottery dating to the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Then, in 2020, further riverbank erosion brought new material to the surface roughly four metres to the south-west. Archaeologists opened a trench of around seven square metres and fully excavated a skeleton belonging to a child aged between nine and eleven years at the time of death. Radiocarbon dating placed this individual's death somewhere between 1045 and 1225 AD, a date range that sits comfortably within the medieval period but predates the pottery found with the earlier group, suggesting the site may have been in use across a considerable span of time. A second burial was partially uncovered during the same intervention and left preserved in place, as were two possible grave cuts that contained no surviving bone. A geophysical survey was carried out in an attempt to map the full extent of the burials beneath the surface, but returned no useful results, leaving the true scale of the site unknown.

The riverbank has since received protection works funded through the Community Monuments Fund in 2021, which should slow further erosion and loss of material. The site is not signposted or formally accessible in the way that a scheduled monument with visitor infrastructure might be, and the burials that remain are preserved in situ beneath the ground rather than on display. Anyone walking the Ward river corridor in this part of north County Dublin is, in a quiet sense, passing over ground that has held the dead since at least the eleventh century, with no particular marker to say so.