They are not dramatic monuments in any conventional sense; there is nothing to see above ground today. But what was recovered from these shallow cuts in the earth offers a quiet, precise glimpse of Bronze Age activity in a part of north County Dublin that rarely features in accounts of prehistoric Ireland.

The site at Ballough was identified during pre-development archaeological works carried out ahead of M1 motorway construction, under excavation licence 01E1138. Five large pits were uncovered, ranging from roughly 1.6 to 3 metres in diameter, and provisionally assigned a Bronze Age date. To their east lay a more concentrated area of about five square metres containing eleven further pits, two post-holes, and eighteen stake-holes, the stake-holes suggesting the former presence of a light timber structure of some kind. Two of the smaller pits produced material of particular interest. A subcircular pit measuring 0.55 by 0.22 metres contained burnt bone, the charred remains suggesting deliberate burning rather than accidental deposition. A nearby oval pit, smaller again at 0.16 by 0.14 metres, yielded a struck flint, a carbonised hazelnut shell (Corylus avellana), a carbonised fruit stone, and a single sherd of prehistoric pottery. The finds were recorded and published by Chapple in 2002. Hazelnuts appear with striking regularity on Irish prehistoric sites; they were a reliable and storable food source, and their charred shells preserve well in the archaeological record over millennia.

There is no public access to or visible trace of this site, which now lies within or adjacent to the M1 road corridor. Its value is documentary rather than experiential. Anyone with an interest in the archaeology of routine Bronze Age life in Fingal, the broader north Dublin coastal plain, would find the published excavation report the most practical route in. The finds themselves, modest as they are in scale, belong to a pattern of low-visibility settlement evidence that motorway archaeology across Ireland has done more than almost anything else to reveal.