A sand pit in Brownstown, County Kildare, turned out to be something considerably older than its industrial purpose suggested. What the Ordnance Survey marked simply as a gravel pit concealed a Bronze Age burial site that only came to light, as so often happens, when the ground was being worked rather than studied.

In 1935, labourers digging in the sand pit uncovered two skeletons alongside four Food Vessels and an Encrusted Urn. Food Vessels are a type of decorated ceramic associated with Early Bronze Age burials in Ireland and Britain, typically placed with the dead around 2000 to 1500 BC. Encrusted Urns, named for the applied clay ornament on their surfaces, are similarly Bronze Age in date and are often found containing cremated remains. The 1935 finds were recorded by the National Museum of Ireland. Then, in 1943, a second discovery was made a short distance to the north-west of the original site: cremated bones, another Encrusted Urn, and a slug knife, a small flint blade characteristic of the period, were retrieved and likewise accessioned. Together the two finds suggest a localised burial area used over some span of time, with both inhumation and cremation practised within the same general location. The site no longer exists in any visible form; aerial photography from 2005 shows the area had by then been quarried away entirely, leaving nothing on the surface to mark what was once there.