That it did survive, buried in the organic silt at the base of a cess pit in what is now a north Dublin suburb, says something about the particular conditions underground at Poppintree, and something too about how much of early medieval Ireland still lies beneath the ordinary ground we walk across every day.

The site was excavated under licence number 05E0644 in advance of a residential development, which is how most archaeology of this kind comes to light in Ireland; a planning condition requires investigation before the ground is broken for foundations. Archaeologists uncovered a cluster of pits and a ditch, three of which were interpreted as cess pits, essentially rubbish and waste deposits, arranged in a rough line between seven and fifteen metres apart, each averaging around 1.8 metres in depth. The wooden vessel came from one of these pits, and radiocarbon dating placed it to between approximately AD 891 and 1013, a period spanning the later Viking Age in Ireland. A sediment sample taken from the base of the same pit was analysed for plant remains and produced a telling domestic inventory: plum seeds, blackberries, raspberries, and hazelnuts, a mix of cultivated and foraged food. Animal bones from the site included cow, sheep or goat, pig, horse, and dog. Taken together, the assemblage suggests a household or small settlement nearby, with the pits located on its outer edge, as McCarthy noted in 2008. Once each pit had served its purpose it was deliberately backfilled.

There is nothing to see at Poppintree today in the conventional sense; the site lies beneath or beside housing built after the 2005 excavation. The finds and records are held in the archaeological archive rather than on any visible landscape. The value here is less in visiting than in knowing: that somewhere under the rooflines of a modern Dublin suburb, a household threw out plum stones and hazelnut shells, kept dogs and horses, and owned a neatly crafted wooden box, sometime around the turn of the first millennium.