It is an easy thing to miss in the landscape, and in truth it nearly was missed entirely, swallowed into the trench and gone.

The pit came to light during construction of the Bruff-Mallow gas pipeline, and was recorded by archaeologist M. Gowen. The combination of charcoal and cremated bone points to a cremation burial, a practice with deep roots in prehistoric Ireland, in which a body was burned on a pyre and the remains, sometimes gathered carefully, sometimes placed with less ceremony, were deposited in a pit in the earth. The Rathgoggan example is modest in scale, the pit barely large enough to hold an infant, and the bone fragments described are sparse, mere specks rather than a substantial deposit. Whether that reflects the original burial practice, the limits of what survived in the soil, or the disruption of the find context is impossible now to say with certainty.