The burials have turned up in gardens, under concrete paths, and during roadworks, always just below the surface, never quite where anyone expected. The church to which the graveyard belonged has been gone for centuries, and for a long period its very location was forgotten. Yet the dead have proved harder to erase than the building that once stood above them.

St Nicholas's parish church first appears in the historical record in an inquisition of 1200 to 1201, and again in Bishop Donatus O'Brien's ordinance of 1204 to 1206, which lists it as the dean's parish. A legacy was bequeathed to it by Geoffrey Galwey in 1445, and the Hardiman map of around 1590 shows the building in some detail, with a side aisle to the north, a central tower with a low pointed spire, and a planted cemetery adjoining it. By 1615 it was reportedly in good repair, but the seventeenth-century sieges of Limerick ended that. The church was destroyed, most likely in 1651, and by the time of the Civil Survey of 1654 both church and churchyard had been handed to the Commissioners of Revenue for secular use. St Nicholas's parish was eventually amalgamated with the neighbouring parish of St Mary's, and the church itself was razed. The Widow's Almshouses, built in the area probably in the early 1700s following the Siege of 1691, went up in the former grounds of the church, and by that point even the memory of the graveyard beneath had apparently been lost.

The site has no visible trace of its former use. What draws attention to it now is largely the archaeological record accumulated through successive interventions. In January 1998, utility works began without archaeological oversight in a garden near Nicholas Street; human bone was quickly found, works were halted, and the disturbed area was backfilled. In 2000 and 2001, Celie O'Rahilly monitored refurbishment works along Nicholas Street and recovered disarticulated human bone, two sherds of medieval pottery, and one piece of post-medieval pottery from beneath the footpath at the Almshouse entrance. Then, in 2013, monitoring of works to create a parking space near the Widow's Almshouses by Aegis Archaeology revealed a minimum of seven burials lying just below the topsoil, along with disarticulated remains representing at least three adults and three juveniles. Most burials followed the conventional Christian orientation, heads to the south-west, with one exception: a child of around three years old, buried with the head to the north-east. One adult, possibly female based on skeletal morphology alone, was buried prone, face down, which is a rare and not fully understood departure from the norm. Those 2013 burials were covered with sand and reinforced concrete and preserved in place. They remain there still, beneath the street.