When Bord Gáis Éireann began cutting the route for its Pipeline to the West in 2002, construction work through a gently sloping field in Ballynabanoge, County Limerick, turned up something that no Ordnance Survey map and no aerial photograph had ever recorded: a cluster of pits and a cremation burial, invisible to every prior survey, lying quietly in the pasture about 100 metres from the River Maigue. Sites like this one are a reminder of how much the Irish landscape still conceals, not in remote bogs or on dramatic hilltops, but in ordinary farmland that has been walked over for generations without anyone knowing what lay beneath.

The excavation, documented by Taylor in 2004 and published as part of a wider study by Grogan and colleagues in 2007, uncovered a cremation burial and three pits within a corridor of just 24 metres, straddling the base of a low hill and the edge of the river flood-plain. Two of the pits, designated Pit 1 and Pit 3, were cut into silty clay on the slope above a gravel terrace. Pit 1 was small and precisely made, sub-circular with a diameter of roughly half a metre and steep, smoothly finished sides and base; its fill was a black clayey silt with an extraordinary charcoal content of around 80 per cent. Pit 3, larger and ovoid, had a bowl-shaped profile and a fill of grey-brown silt containing charcoal in discrete lenses mixed with occasional limestone pieces. No absolute dating was recovered, but the careful construction and very high charcoal content of Pit 1 closely match Bronze Age cremation-related features found at other sites along the same pipeline route in County Limerick. The excavator's interpretation is cautious but suggestive: these may be symbolic or so-called blind burials, a term used for pits that replicate the form of a burial deposit without necessarily containing human remains, a funerary gesture whose precise meaning remains unclear.

There is nothing to see at Ballynabanoge today. The pipeline corridor has long since been reinstated as farmland, the features are backfilled, and the site sits on private agricultural land close to the townland boundary with Inchinclare. What makes it worth knowing about is not the physical remains but the pattern it belongs to: a large group of prehistoric archaeological sites recorded within 500 metres to the south-east, collectively pointing to sustained activity in this part of the Maigue valley long before any written record begins. For anyone researching the Bronze Age landscape of County Limerick, the published report by Grogan and colleagues is the place to start, and the broader Pipeline to the West project remains one of the most significant episodes of developer-funded archaeology ever carried out in Ireland.