Then the plough caught a large stone, lifted it clear, and revealed what lay beneath: an oval pit containing cremated bone mixed with charcoal, the quiet remnant of a burial that had gone unrecorded on any map, unnoticed through all the decades of Ordnance Survey work in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The National Museum of Ireland examined the remains and identified them as characteristic of a Neolithic or Early Bronze Age cremation burial, meaning the pit could plausibly date to anywhere between roughly 4000 and 1500 BC. Cremation burials of this type, where the bones of the dead were burned and then placed, often with charcoal, into a simple pit in the earth, are known across prehistoric Ireland, though they frequently leave little surface trace and tend to surface only when the ground is disturbed. This one was registered by the museum under the reference 1964:47. Two years later, in 1966, a second burial of broadly similar character was found nearby, though it was heavily disturbed in the course of its discovery and relatively little could be learned from it. The two finds together suggest that what looks like ordinary Co. Westmeath grazing land may once have served as a place of deliberate, repeated funerary activity, though how extensive any such use was remains unknown.