Beneath the front lawn of one of Ireland's grandest Georgian houses, a Bronze Age cemetery had been quietly waiting. It came to light in 2010, not through a planned excavation, but because a trench was being dug for a gas pipeline and services ducting across the grounds of Castletown House in County Kildare. What the machinery cut through turned out to be a cluster of pit burials dating to the later third millennium BC, roughly four thousand years before the house above them was built.

The Office of Public Works had commissioned restoration works within Castletown Demesne, and archaeological monitoring was in place under Excavation Licence No. 10E0414 when the discovery was made. An area of approximately eight by nine metres was opened under archaeological direction to establish what had been found. At the centre of it was a crouched inhumation, a burial in which the body had been placed in a tightly folded position, accompanied by a crushed ceramic vessel. Both fit the Bowl Tradition of Bronze Age burial practice, a funerary custom of the period characterised by the interment of the dead alongside distinctive pottery bowls. The burial and vessel were fully recorded and removed. Around it, the service trench had already cut through at least six further pit burials, each sub-circular in plan, ranging from one to two metres in diameter and up to 0.6 metres deep, and filled with cremated bone. Four additional sherds of prehistoric pottery were recovered. Those remaining pits were recorded where they lay and left undisturbed. A concentration of compact stony material roughly three metres across, lying to the north-east of the excavated burial, may represent the levelled core of a low mound. The spatial arrangement of the pits is suggestive: smaller pits containing cremations appear to have been set into the edges of this stony material, while larger pits, including the one with the inhumation, were placed just outside it. The provisional interpretation is that cremations were inserted into a small focal mound, with inhumation burials arranged around its periphery, a pattern known from other Bronze Age funerary sites in Ireland.