The object came out of the base of what locals called an old drain, found just below the bottom level of the peat on a south-facing slope at Buddaghauns. Turf cutting is physical, disruptive work, and the shears had almost certainly been dislodged from a higher position and carried down into the drain as it was being dug. In that sense, its discovery was partly accidental, and its original resting place is gone.

The significance lies not so much in the shears itself as in what the drain suggests. Writing in 1946, the archaeologist O'Kelly interpreted the feature as evidence of a pre-bog field system, meaning a landscape of organised farmland that was already established before the blanket peat grew over it and buried it. Peat accumulation in Ireland began in earnest during the Bronze Age and continued through subsequent millennia, gradually swallowing field boundaries, walls, and drainage channels that had once been part of working agricultural land. The drain at Buddaghauns belongs to that category of features, now invisible, that only come to light when the peat is cut away. The full extent of the field system it once served is not known, and with the field reclaimed and no visible trace of the drain remaining, the ground gives nothing away.