But the pit uncovered at Ballymackeamore is one of those small archaeological finds that rewards close attention precisely because of its modesty. Barely eight centimetres deep at its lowest point and just over a metre in length, it was never meant to last. It was a working feature, not a monument, and the fact that it survived at all is largely down to chance.

The site came to light during topsoil-stripping along the route of a Bord Gáis Éireann Pipeline to the West, one of the large infrastructure projects that, over recent decades, has generated a great deal of incidental archaeology across the Irish midlands and west. Excavation was carried out by Emer Dennehy under licence reference 02E0492. The pit itself was curvilinear in plan, with gently concave sides, an uneven stony base, and a fill composed of dark grey clayey silt containing burnt limestone and sandstone fragments, a small amount of charcoal, and some unburnt bone. The burnt stone and charcoal suggest the feature was used in cooking. A pot-boiler, to explain the term, is a pit into which water is poured and heated by dropping fire-scorched stones into it; the alternative here, a roasting pit, works without water, using accumulated heat in the ground itself. Because the pit showed no signs of waterlogging or retained moisture, Dennehy concluded a roasting function was the more probable explanation. The find was compiled by Denis Power and uploaded to the excavations.ie database in August 2012.

There is nothing to see at Ballymackeamore today. The pit was recorded and the pipeline route moved on. What remains is the documentation, and the quiet implication that someone, at some point well before the historical record begins in this part of Limerick, stopped here long enough to cook a meal. The excavations.ie record holds the full technical description for anyone wishing to follow up the details of the deposit or the licence number.