The pit measured roughly one metre square and was cut into yellow clay, with the remains consisting mainly of limb bones, scattered rather than laid out in any deliberate arrangement. That disorder was itself the clue: these were not primary burials, people interred here for the first time, but redeposited remains, bones that had already been moved at least once before, most likely disturbed during the wave of building work that reshaped the site during the mid-nineteenth century.

The discovery took place on the grounds of the convent school attached to the Holy Trinity Church at Blackabbey townland, a site with a long and layered past. The church itself occupies the remains of a medieval Trinitarian abbey, an order founded in the twelfth century for the ransoming of Christian captives from North Africa and the Holy Land. The abbey was restored by the Earl of Dunraven in 1811 and enlarged again in 1852. A separate portion of the old ruin was converted into a convent for the Sisters of Mercy in 1854, and by 1869 a chapel and an infants' school had been added to the complex. It was that accumulation of Victorian construction, compressing new foundations and floors onto old monastic ground, that almost certainly disturbed whatever burials had lain undisturbed for centuries. The site was reported to the National Museum of Ireland and visited on its behalf by Larry Walsh, then curator of Limerick Museum, whose assessment of the bones as redeposited is recorded by Cahill and Sikora in their 2011 survey.

The site sits within Adare village, and the Holy Trinity Church remains an active place of worship, so access to the immediate grounds is limited and visitors should be respectful of that. The school yard where the bones were found is not a public space. The remains themselves were reinterred locally following the investigation, and there is no permanent marker visible to a passing visitor. What is worth pausing to consider, if you walk the village and look at the church's fabric, is how many centuries of use, adaptation, and rebuilding are compressed into a single set of walls, and how occasionally, when a floor is lifted or a foundation dug, that compressed history makes itself known in the most literal way possible.