The widening of the N11 road through County Wicklow, a corridor of tarmac and engineering that most drivers pass along without a second thought, turned out to disturb something considerably older than anyone expected. At Kilmurry, a small burnt spread, the scorched residue of ancient activity at ground level, and an associated pit came to light during the improvement works, quiet and unassuming features that would have been invisible to any passing eye.

Archaeologist Yvonne Whitty excavated the site as part of the road scheme's programme of investigative works. The pit yielded a single object: a convex end scraper of Neolithic date. An end scraper is a small, carefully shaped stone tool, typically worked from flint, with a rounded cutting or scraping edge at one end, and was used in tasks such as preparing hides or working wood. The Neolithic in Ireland spans roughly from around 4000 to 2500 BC, a period associated with the first farming communities on the island. That a single tool of this period emerged from an otherwise modest feature suggests the pit may represent the earliest phase of activity on the site, a faint trace of someone present in this part of Wicklow long before any road, field boundary, or settlement we would recognise today.