The pits occupy a combined area of roughly 3.7 metres by 1.6 metres, a modest footprint for what is, in essence, a place of the dead. Cremation pits of this kind are typically understood as Bronze Age in origin, used to inter the processed remains of the cremated after a funeral pyre had done its work, though the exact period here was not specified in the excavation record.

The site at Caheranardrish came to light not through a dedicated excavation campaign but through the routine archaeological monitoring that accompanies large infrastructure projects in Ireland. When Bord Gáis Éireann laid a gas pipeline between Barnakyle and Coonagh West, the ground along the route was watched closely by archaeologists as a condition of the licence. It was during this monitoring work that Ken Wiggins identified the site, logging it as BGE 4/2/1 under licence 02E1649. A subsequent excavation licence, 02E1732, was issued for a more thorough investigation. What began as two anomalous soil patches resolved, on closer examination, into four distinct pits: F1, F2, F3, and F4, each no more than half a metre across and shallow enough that a careful trowel stroke might have missed them entirely. The smallest was just ten centimetres deep. All four were filled with charcoal-rich soil containing fragments of cremated bone, the physical residue of burial practices carried out in this quiet corner of Limerick long before the present landscape took shape.

There is nothing to see at the site today. The pits were excavated and recorded as part of pipeline works, and the ground has since been returned to use. The value of Caheranardrish lies not in any visible monument but in what the record preserves: the precise measurements, the careful layer-by-layer description, the acknowledgement that four small holes in Irish soil once held human remains. The excavation results are summarised on excavations.ie, where the site entries for 2002 and 2003 carry the full account. For anyone interested in the archaeology of the Irish midlands and lower Shannon region, browsing the pipeline monitoring reports from this period reveals just how densely the landscape was used by earlier peoples, most of it invisible above ground until a mechanical excavator breaks the surface.