The site at Coolmore is a flat cemetery, meaning it left no visible mound or monument above ground, nothing to catch the eye of a passing farmer or road-builder. That invisibility is precisely what makes its eventual discovery so striking.

The cemetery came to light in 2006 during excavations ahead of the N9/N10 Kilcullen to Waterford road scheme. What archaeologists uncovered was a multi-period burial ground used, with apparent continuity of intent if not of community, from the Early Neolithic period into the Middle Bronze Age. At its centre sat an upright ceramic vessel holding the cremated remains of an adult, a burial mode typical of the Bronze Age, when cremation and pot burial were common funerary practices across Ireland and Britain. Around it were sixteen further pits containing cremated bone, along with charcoal spreads suggesting repeated burning activity. Another sixty-two pits held charcoal-rich fills but no bone at all, their purpose unclear, though one showed oxidation along its base, hinting at in-situ burning. Radiocarbon dating placed the earliest cremation deposits firmly in the Early Neolithic, between approximately 4049 and 3971 calibrated BC, with a second Neolithic deposit dating to around 3248 to 3099 BC. The vessel burial and several other cremation pits returned Middle Bronze Age dates, clustering around 1458 to 1386 BC. What this means, in plain terms, is that the same elevated slope was chosen as a place for the dead by at least two, and possibly more, quite separate prehistoric communities, centuries apart, who may have had no direct knowledge of one another's burials below their feet.