During groundworks, a number of human bones came to light roughly thirty metres to the north-west of a local ringfort, at a depth of only about forty centimetres below the surface. Shallow burials of this kind are easy to miss and easier still to disturb before anyone realises what they are.

The bones appeared to rest on or within a shallow pit cut into the underlying boulder clay, and the arrangement has led archaeologists to suggest these may be the remains of a crouched burial in an unlined pit. Crouched burials, in which the body is drawn up into a foetal position rather than laid out flat, are associated in Ireland with a long span of prehistory, from the Neolithic through to the early medieval period, though without further investigation it is impossible to assign a date to this particular individual. The proximity to the ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead used widely across Ireland from roughly the early medieval period onwards, is worth noting. Ringforts and their immediate surroundings sometimes served informal burial functions, and the spatial relationship here, while not conclusive, is suggestive. The find was recorded by the topographical files of University College Galway, which is how it entered the wider archaeological record at all.