A flat cemetery, as the term suggests, leaves no visible mound or marker above ground; the dead were interred in pits and urns at or near the original surface, meaning that centuries of ploughing, field drainage, and post-medieval ditching had passed directly over these burials without anyone knowing they were there.

The cemetery at Quarry came to light during pre-construction testing of land earmarked for the M11 Motorway, when two cinerary urn burials and several pit burials were identified. The site was subsequently excavated in full. Two ceramic urns had been placed inverted over cremated remains, a practice common in the Irish Bronze Age, where the urn effectively acts as a protective cover for the burnt bone deposited beneath it. The northern urn was in sufficiently poor condition that it had to be removed as a single block and taken to laboratory conditions for careful excavation and conservation. The southern urn had been set into the layered fills of a larger subrectangular pit, its base sitting within charcoal-rich grey silt beneath a band of yellow pebbly silt, suggesting the pit had already begun to accumulate sediment before the urn was placed inside. Alongside the two urn burials, excavators found four pit burials, four further pits containing charcoal but no bone, two clusters of stake-holes, and deposits of burnt material scattered across the site. About nine metres separated the two urn burials, and various pit burials and stake-holes were clustered around each. Roughly six metres to the south-east, a cereal-drying kiln was excavated as part of the same investigation, hinting at a settled agricultural presence in the immediate area. A post-medieval field ditch, by then long silted up, ran close to the northern edge of the cemetery, a reminder of how many later layers of land use had accumulated above these prehistoric deposits before the motorway project stripped them back.