They were not placed there with any ceremony that history has chosen to record. They were simply put back, gathered up during building work and returned to the ground from which they had been disturbed.

The story comes down through the Ordnance Survey Letters of 1838 to 1840, a remarkable series of historical memoranda compiled by surveyors travelling Ireland's parishes. When the Earl of Meath demolished the old house at Kilruddery in 1820 and built the structure that stands today, workmen turning the earth on the north side of the building encountered great quantities of human bones. The precise origin of those remains was already uncertain at the time of writing, some eighteen years later. There was, the letters record, no surviving account of exactly where the medieval church of Kilruddery had stood, though the bones were presumably connected to it. A church would typically have been accompanied by a burial ground, and the north side of a church was conventional ground for the interment of the unbaptised or the unremarked. Whatever their history, the bones were not removed or dispersed. They were gathered and placed back together in the same ground, beneath what became the new house's north elevation.