The pit was small, barely thirty-five centimetres across and twelve deep, yet it contained the cremated remains of a single adult, reduced to bone and placed in the ground with no apparent marker that has survived. It is exactly the kind of find that vanishes into a technical report, footnoted and catalogued, while the bypass carries traffic overhead.

Archaeological monitoring during construction of the N8 Glanmire-Watergrasshill Bypass brought the burial to light. A radiocarbon date taken from the cremated bone returned a result of 2895 ± 40 BP, a figure that, when calibrated, places the burial somewhere in the later Bronze Age, roughly the early to mid first millennium BC. What makes the find more than an isolated curiosity is its landscape context. Two further pit-burials were identified within 520 metres to the south, and a possible Bronze Age house sits roughly 300 metres in the same direction. Pit-burials of this type, small earthen cuts containing cremated bone without an urn or obvious grave goods, are a recognised feature of Bronze Age funerary practice in Ireland, often found in loose clusters rather than formal cemeteries. The grouping here, spread across a hillside, suggests that this part of north Cork was not empty farmland three thousand years ago but a place where people lived, and buried their dead, within sight of one another.