A low circular mound on the outskirts of Timolin in County Kildare would have been unremarkable to most people passing by, until road engineers began planning a realignment of the N9 between Moone, Timolin, and Ballitore Hill. The mound sat directly in the path of the new road, and because cist burials, the Bronze Age practice of interring the dead in small stone-lined boxes, had already turned up on either side of the proposed route, archaeologists decided to investigate the whole area rather than just the portion at risk. What they found beneath that low rise of earth was a small, layered community of the dead, ranging from a carefully placed individual to a shared cremation, all compressed into a space that road-builders might otherwise have shifted in an afternoon.

The excavation, carried out under licence number 99E0203, uncovered two pit burials and two cists within the mound itself. The first pit contained the disarticulated bones of a child aged five to seven, disturbed in antiquity by collapsed flat stones. The second pit had been even more thoroughly disturbed; only two fragments of cremated bone survived, along with a fragment of clay pipe stem that speaks to some later interference. The two cists told more complete stories. The first, a four-sided stone box measuring 1.2 metres by 0.8 metres with a single capstone and no floor slab, held the crouched inhumation of a woman aged between 25 and 35. She lay on her right side, facing west, with her head to the south, and no grave-goods were placed with her. The second cist was more elaborate, polygonal rather than rectangular, with an inner chamber and an outer ring of inward-sloping slabs. It was shallow, barely 20 centimetres deep in places, yet it held the cremated remains of two adults and one child, accompanied by two ceramic vessels: one upright vase and one undecorated pot placed inverted over the deposit. Beyond the Bronze Age burials, the wider fieldwork turned up quantities of medieval pottery scattered across the topsoil, likely spread by centuries of ploughing, and possibly connected to a Fair Green that historical sources place somewhere nearby.