In October 2016, during archaeological monitoring of topsoil removal along the new route, excavators uncovered a single pit near a place called Crane in County Wexford, sitting at the foot of a north-facing slope about eighty metres from a small meandering stream. The pit was modest in scale, roughly 1.7 metres east to west and 1.5 metres north to south, with a maximum depth of 0.65 metres. Nothing was found inside it in the way of tools, pottery, or objects of any kind. What it did contain, in its lowest fill, was charcoal, and that charcoal turned out to be the whole point.

The charcoal was entirely oak, and a radiocarbon date taken from a fragment placed its origin somewhere between 3893 and 3661 BC, a span that falls squarely in the early Neolithic. That period marks the arrival in Ireland of farming communities who cleared forest, built rectangular timber houses, and began burying their dead in megalithic tombs. Oak was the dominant woodland tree of the island at the time, and its presence in the lowest of the pit's three fills raises quiet questions about what was once burned here and why. No definitive answer is possible from the evidence alone. Pits of this kind, sometimes interpreted as offerings, storage features, or the remnants of small fires associated with ritual or clearance activity, are not uncommon finds from Neolithic Ireland, though each one adds another data point to what remains an incomplete picture of how people organised and used the landscape nearly six thousand years ago. The pit was fully excavated and recorded under the same monitoring licence that identified it, meaning the ground it occupied now lies beneath the carriageway of the M11.