The find was modest in scale but precise in what it suggested: a deliberate storage feature, set within a landscape that had been carefully bounded and divided.

Excavations carried out in 2006, recorded under licence number 06E0176, uncovered the pit in association with a double-ditched enclosure, a type of enclosed settlement site where two concentric ditches defined and defended a central area, commonly found across early medieval Ireland. The pit itself measured 1.45 metres in diameter and yielded animal bone alongside a charred wooden plank. The plank is the more quietly arresting detail. Charring can preserve organic material that would otherwise rot away entirely in Irish soil conditions, and its presence alongside animal bone points to some kind of domestic or agricultural activity, possibly food storage or processing. The finds were reported by Mc Carthy around 2009, and the record was compiled by Geraldine Stout, uploaded in May 2012.

Ballynakelly is a rural townland, and there is little on the surface today to indicate what lies beneath. The enclosure associated with the pit carries the record number DU021-106, which can be looked up through the Archaeological Survey of Ireland's online database if you want to orient yourself before visiting the general area. The excavated features will have been backfilled after investigation, as is standard practice, so there is nothing visible to inspect at the site itself. The value of coming here is less about what can be seen and more about the habit of reading a landscape, noticing the slight rises and field boundaries that sometimes preserve, faintly, the memory of enclosures that were already old when the Norman settlement of Dublin was still fresh.