The site left no mark on any Ordnance Survey map, historic or otherwise, and had it not been for roadworks, it might never have been found at all. This is the kind of archaeology that only comes to light by accident, and that makes it all the more interesting: a burial ground with no stone monument, no enclosing bank, no visible surface feature, only the quiet geometry of pits in the earth.

In 2001, topsoil stripping ahead of the construction of the Limerick South Ring Road exposed the site at Peafield, on a gentle south-west-facing slope roughly ninety metres north-east of the Groody River and about 175 metres south-east of the M7 interchange at Ballysimon. A subsequent excavation, carried out under licence number 01E0030 and recorded by Collins in 2001, revealed a total of ten pits of varying sizes and purposes. The main grouping consisted of one large oval pit, measuring approximately 2.1 metres north to south and 1.6 metres east to west, which contained occasional flecks of charcoal, along with eight smaller pits clustered around a flat boulder. Each of these smaller pits, averaging around 0.4 metres in diameter, held charcoal and cremated bone, the physical remains of a cremation burial practice common in prehistoric Ireland. A further isolated pit, roughly a hundred metres to the east, was circular in shape and contained substantial quantities of cremated human bone and charcoal. The flat boulder at the centre of the main grouping may have served as a focal point for the burials, though its precise function is not recorded.

The site itself no longer exists as a visible feature in the landscape; it was identified and excavated precisely because construction work was about to destroy it, and the road now runs close by. What survives is the excavation record, held within the National Monuments Service archive and accessible through the Sites and Monuments Record for County Limerick. For anyone interested in the archaeology of cremation burial in Ireland, the Peafield site is a useful reminder that flat cemeteries, as archaeologists call unenclosed burial grounds with no upstanding remains, are far more common than the landscape currently suggests, their presence known only when something disturbs the ground beneath our feet.