In 1979, during widening operations on a road south of Carrickgollogan hill, close to the County Wicklow border, construction machinery clipped two Bronze Age pit burials that had lain undisturbed for roughly three and a half thousand years. The word "truncated" in the archaeological record is doing quiet, melancholy work: these graves were not excavated so much as interrupted, their edges cut away before anyone knew they were there.

What survived was nonetheless significant. The first grave contained the cremated remains of a young adult, placed inside a cordoned urn that had been inverted over the burial, a practice found elsewhere in Irish Bronze Age contexts where the vessel is turned upside down to cover and protect the bones beneath. A cordoned urn is a ceramic vessel characteristic of the earlier Bronze Age in Ireland and Britain, distinguished by horizontal raised bands, or cordons, applied around the outside of the pot. The second grave held a cordoned urn placed the conventional way up, and contained the remains of two individuals, an adult and a juvenile buried together. Radiocarbon dating of the cremated bone from the cordoned urn produced a calibrated date range of 1736 to 1531 BC at 95% probability, while bone from the second, undecorated urn dated to between 1684 and 1523 BC, placing both firmly in the Middle Bronze Age. The finds were published by M. Cahill and M. Sikora in 2011.

There is nothing to see at the site today; the burials were discovered incidentally and the location has long since been absorbed back into the road corridor south of Carrickgollogan. The hill itself is a recognisable landmark on the Dublin and Wicklow borderlands, and the area around it repays general exploration for anyone interested in the archaeology of the region. The significance of Ballyman lies less in any surviving physical presence than in what the radiocarbon dates confirm: that people were cremating their dead and burying them in carefully made ceramic vessels in this corner of south County Dublin well over three thousand years ago, quietly, in pits in the ground, until a road crew in 1979 brought them briefly back into the light.