In June 1954, land reclamation works carried out under the Land Rehabilitation Project brought a bulldozer across a naturally raised area roughly twenty metres across. As the ground was levelled, human bones and teeth began to surface. There were no grave structures, no enclosing bank or fosse, just remains scattered among small stones, with a single square-headed iron nail apparently adhering to a fragment of bone. The natural rise itself no longer exists.

The site was known locally as Kilwarig, and local tradition held it to be a killeen, the Irish term for an unofficial burial ground used for unbaptised infants, who under Catholic practice were excluded from consecrated ground. Such sites, often unmarked and set apart from the parish churchyard, are found across Ireland, frequently on older or liminal ground. The complication at Kilwarig was that the remains did not fit neatly into that tradition. When archaeologist Breandán Ó Ríordáin investigated the site, he noted that a number of the individuals appeared to be adults, not children, which sits uneasily with the killeen identification. Whether the site served multiple purposes over time, or whether the local tradition had attached itself to a burial ground of quite different origins, was not resolved. Ó Ríordáin also recorded, in the same field, traces of a possible fulacht fiadh, a type of prehistoric cooking site typically identified by a mound of fire-cracked stone near a water source, suggesting the area had seen human activity across very different periods. The field fence that once skirted the south-eastern edge of the site has since been removed, and nothing of the original rise remains above ground.