The find itself is modest by most measures: a roughly circular hollow, just over a metre across and less than half a metre deep, filled with five distinct layers of silty clay. What makes it worth pausing over is not its size but its age, and the quiet questions it raises about what people were doing in this part of Meath during the Early Bronze Age.

The pit came to light at what archaeologists designated Site 29, one of thirty-seven locations flagged during a programme of monitoring and topsoil stripping that ran intermittently from December 2015 to October 2018 across roughly 92 hectares in the Clonee, Portan, and Gunnocks area. The work was directed by P. Duffy, D. Bayle, and J. Whitaker, and the pit itself was excavated under a separate licence by D. Bayley. The five fills contained varying amounts of charcoal, but fragments of wood and burnt bone appeared only in the upper three layers. The bone was too fragmentary to identify with confidence, though it is thought to be animal in origin. Charcoal from the basal fill, the lowest and therefore earliest layer, was identified as hazel, and a radiocarbon date taken from that sample returned a calibrated date of 2127 to 1897 BC, placing activity here firmly in the Early Bronze Age, the period when communities in Ireland were beginning to work copper and bronze and leaving behind pits, burnt mounds, and other traces that remain poorly understood. Whether this pit was used for cooking, for processing materials, or for some purpose that leaves no clear material signature is not something the evidence resolves.