They had never appeared on any Ordnance Survey map, historic or modern, and might have remained entirely unknown had a gas pipeline not passed directly over them. That is the nature of this kind of discovery: not dramatic, not monumental, but quietly significant precisely because of how ordinary the circumstances of its finding were.

In 2002, topsoil-stripping for the Bord Gáis Éireann Pipeline to the West brought archaeologist Ken Wiggins to this stretch of pasture in Ballincurra, lying 155 metres east of the townland boundary with Rathcannon and 45 metres north of a stream. Wiggins identified a cluster of features, recorded as BGE 3/76/8, which were subsequently excavated by Kate Taylor under licence No. 02E0504. What she found within a 20-metre section of the pipeline easement was a probable cremation burial pit, a separate pit, and a shallow scoop. The burial pit itself was subcircular, just 0.34 metres in diameter and 0.13 metres deep, with a bowl-shaped profile. Its fill was a mid-brown, humic, silty clay containing charcoal, occasional crumbs of burnt clay, and small fragments of burnt bone. Cremation burial, in which a body is burnt and the remains gathered into a pit, was a common funerary practice during the Bronze Age in Ireland, roughly 2500 to 500 BC. Whether the bone fragments here are actually human remains uncertain; no diagnostically human pieces were identified during excavation. The assemblage was considered likely prehistoric in origin, possibly Bronze Age, based on the general character of the materials and the presence of what appears to be a funerary deposit.

There is nothing to see at this location today. The site has been fully excavated, and nothing is visible on aerial imagery. The field has returned to pasture, and the pipeline runs beneath it without ceremony. The value of the record lies in the archive, not the ground. For anyone curious enough to follow up, the excavation findings are summarised in Taylor 2004 and discussed further in Grogan 2007, both of which deal with the wider pipeline corridor and its archaeological results.