It never appeared on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch maps, and there was nothing visible at the surface to suggest anything lay beneath. Yet once the sod and topsoil were cleared, something quietly significant came to light.

The pit at Ballynatona was uncovered during construction of the Bórd Gáis Éireann Curraleigh West-to-Limerick gas pipeline, documented by Gowen in 1988. Archaeologist Claire Walsh excavated the feature, designated site TR/2/13/1, and found a truncated pit measuring 90 centimetres by 1.4 metres and just 20 centimetres deep, sealed beneath approximately 50 centimetres of accumulated topsoil. Within that modest cut were the remains of cremated bone, though too fragmentary to identify, along with twelve sherds of coarse pottery and six fragments of struck flint and chert. Struck flint refers to stone that has been deliberately knapped or shaped, a technique associated with prehistoric tool-making. The combination of cremated bone, handmade pottery, and worked stone places this pit broadly within a prehistoric funerary or ritual tradition, though no more precise date was recorded in the published summary. A ringfort, a type of circular enclosed farmstead typically dating from the early medieval period, lies around 125 metres to the south-west, suggesting the area has seen human activity across a considerable span of time.

The site sits in pastureland roughly 95 metres north-east of the townland boundary with Spittle, and there is nothing to mark it now. Pipeline archaeology of this kind rarely leaves a visible trace once the ground is reinstated, and this spot is no exception. For anyone interested in the mechanics of how such discoveries are made, Gowen's 1988 report, which includes a location map, and Walsh's 1987 excavation summary are the primary sources. The real interest here is less about visiting a monument and more about the nature of the evidence itself: the fact that an act of prehistoric burial or deposition could survive undisturbed, unrecorded, and entirely unremarkable in appearance until a gas pipe happened to pass within reach of it.