It surfaced not through any planned archaeological campaign but because the route of the N11 needed improving, and the ground had to give way before the machinery could move in.

The pit was excavated by archaeologist Yvonne Whitty as part of the N11 road improvement scheme, under excavation licence E3201. A radiocarbon date confirmed its antiquity, placing it somewhere in the broad transitional stretch between the Iron Age and the early medieval period, roughly the centuries around the turn of the first millennium. What the pit was used for is not recorded. Isolated pits of this kind turn up occasionally during road and infrastructure work across Ireland, and their purposes can range from storage to ritual deposition to simple domestic waste disposal. Without associated finds or structures, the function of this particular example remains open. What is clear is that someone was active at Ballinaskea during that period, doing something deliberate enough to require digging into the earth.