What makes this particular find quietly striking is the circumstance of its emergence: it came to light not during a dedicated excavation, but during routine archaeological monitoring carried out ahead of road construction for the N22 Ballincollig Bypass. In the flat terrain of Ballinaspig More, roughly eighty metres east of the Twopot River, the ground gave up something that had lain undisturbed since the Neolithic period.

The pit itself was modest in scale, subcircular in shape and measuring just over half a metre across, with a depth of around twelve centimetres. Inside was a fill of dark brown and black silty clay, a small quantity of poorly preserved cremated bone, and two sherds of pottery. The pottery has been identified as Western Neolithic ware, a tradition associated with some of the earliest farming communities to settle in Ireland and Britain, who brought with them a distinctive ceramic style alongside new agricultural practices. A radiocarbon date obtained from alder charcoal recovered from the pit placed the burial between 3960 and 3700 BC, placing it firmly in the earlier part of the Neolithic. Alder tends to grow in wet, low-lying ground, which fits the riverside setting well, though whether the charcoal reflects deliberate fuel choice or simply what was locally available is impossible to say. The work was carried out by Danaher and colleagues and published in 2004. What the pit represents in human terms remains open: a single individual, a fragment of a larger funerary practice, or something whose full context was lost long before the bypass ever broke the soil.