The more recent layer belongs to the grim arithmetic of the Famine era; the older one, a small shallow pit of charcoal, ash, and burnt bone, was placed there by someone whose world had no concept of a workhouse, or of the catastrophe that would one day disturb their grave.

The Kilkenny Union Workhouse was established in 1843, one of many such institutions built across Ireland in the years immediately preceding and during the Great Famine to house the destitute poor. When archaeologist Cóilín Ó Drisceoil was carrying out monitoring of groundworks for the construction of MacDonagh Junction in 2005, he discovered mass burial pits associated with the workhouse in what had been the south-eastern part of the precinct, an area of open ground just outside the women's yard. A full excavation followed in 2006, led by Brenda O'Meara, who documented the extent of those pits and their contents. During that work, one of the 19th-century pits was found to have cut through something far older: a cremation burial of probable Bronze Age date. The pit itself was small and shallow, measuring roughly 66 centimetres long, 72 centimetres wide, and just 6 centimetres deep at the point where it survived, filled with charcoal, ash, and burnt bone. Beneath the burnt material, excavators recovered several fragments of Bronze Age coarse ware pottery, the kind of plain, hand-built ceramic associated with burial and ritual in prehistoric Ireland.

The two layers of the dead at this site sit in an uncomfortable proximity. A Bronze Age cremation, probably placed with some intention and ceremony, was later sliced through by a pit dug in desperation during one of the worst humanitarian disasters in Irish history. Neither burial was meant to be found by a shopping centre's foundations.