A low circular mound on the edge of Timolin, County Kildare, might have passed unnoticed forever had a road realignment scheme not cut directly through it. When archaeologists stripped back the soil during investigations along the proposed N9 route between Moone, Timolin, and Ballitore Hill, the mound yielded four separate burials, each telling a slightly different story about how people in this part of Kildare once treated their dead.

The excavation, carried out under licence in 1999, revealed two pit burials and two cists. A cist is a small stone-lined grave, typically box-shaped, and the examples found here ranged from a straightforward four-slab construction to a more unusual polygonal form with an outer ring of inward-sloping stones. The simpler cist contained a crouched inhumation, the body of a woman aged between 25 and 35, lying on her right side and facing west, with no grave-goods of any kind. The polygonal cist was more elaborate and more crowded: it held the cremated remains of two adults and one child, along with two ceramic vessels, one upright and one inverted. The pit burials told harder stories. One contained the disarticulated, unburnt bones of a child aged five to seven; the bones had been shifted and broken, apparently by later disturbance, and three flat stones had collapsed down into the pit. The second pit had been disturbed so thoroughly that only two fragments of cremated bone survived, along with a fragment of a clay pipe stem that speaks to activity at the site in a much later period. Scattered medieval pottery was also found across the wider field, probably spread by centuries of ploughing, and the proximity of what records describe as a former Fair Green adds another layer to the long human use of this particular patch of ground.

The geophysical survey that preceded the excavation had identified a number of potential features in the area, including traces of lazy-beds, the narrow cultivation ridges characteristic of earlier Irish farming, and evidence of old drains. It was a methodical, unglamorous process, the kind of archaeology that road schemes routinely produce, and the mound itself was only half within the road corridor. That the full extent was investigated at all was a deliberate decision, taken because cist burials had already been found on either side of the route nearby. The caution proved worthwhile.