No tools, no pottery, no objects of any kind were left behind, only the reddened bases of the pits and the dark stain of charcoal in the silty clay. It is the kind of evidence that archaeology occasionally throws up: not a monument, not a burial, just the residue of ordinary fire, and yet extraordinary for how precisely it can be pinned in time.

The pits came to light during a large-scale programme of archaeological monitoring and excavation carried out intermittently between December 2015 and October 2018, when topsoil was stripped across roughly 92 hectares in the Clonee, Portan, and Gunnocks area of County Meath. The work, led by P. Duffy, D. Bayle, and J. Whitaker, identified 37 locations of potential archaeological significance across that area. Site 18, investigated by D. Bayley under licence 16E0196, turned out to contain three pits clustered within a small zone measuring about 30 metres east to west and 10 metres north to south. The pits were modest in size, the largest roughly a metre across and less than 40 centimetres deep, the smallest shallower still. A piece of oak charcoal recovered from one of them was submitted for radiocarbon dating and returned a calibrated date of 3315 to 2919 BC, placing the activity firmly in the Early Neolithic, the period when farming communities were first establishing themselves in Ireland. Whether these were cooking fires, fires connected to some other domestic purpose, or something less easy to categorise, the evidence does not say.