The deposits were not substantial, each pit containing only a modest quantity of burnt human bone, the kind of deliberate, restrained placing that archaeologists describe as a token deposit. This pattern is characteristic of Bronze Age burial practice, in which portions of cremated remains were sometimes distributed across multiple locations rather than gathered in a single grave. It is a quietly unsettling idea: that the ordinary-looking ground beneath modern development was, several thousand years ago, a place of careful, repeated ceremony.

The pits at Boulabally came to light in 2005, not through any planned investigation but through the routine monitoring that accompanies construction work. Archaeologists Ross McLeod and John Kavanagh identified the features during topsoil stripping carried out for a holiday home development on lands belonging to Adare Manor. Excavation followed under licence number 05E0169. The site sits within the Adare Villas housing scheme, roughly 170 metres south-east of the Adare Demesne townland boundary and about 580 metres west of the River Maigue, which forms the boundary with Mountwilliam townland. Nearby, within 130 to 240 metres to the north and north-west, lie the recorded traces of a metalworking site, further pits and drains, and an enclosure, suggesting that this stretch of ground saw sustained human activity across a long period. None of these features appeared on Ordnance Survey historic mapping, meaning they survived entirely below the surface, unrecorded until the diggers arrived.

The site itself is not accessible or marked in any way that a visitor would recognise. It lies within a modern housing development, and the excavated pits have long since been recorded and built over. The surrounding field showed clear evidence of centuries of intensive agricultural use, including regular plough scarring across the exposed surface and a succession of field drains, both hand-dug and machine-cut, that speak to generations of land improvement. What makes Boulabally worth knowing about is precisely this layering: Bronze Age burial pits sealed beneath ploughsoil, themselves beneath a development that nobody expected to yield anything of note. The record compiled by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly keeps the find available, even if the ground itself has moved on.