The pit itself is modest to the point of near-invisibility: roughly 28 centimetres across and 15 centimetres deep, it would fit comfortably within the span of two hands. What made it legible as a burial at all was its dark, charcoal-rich fill and the fragments of cremated bone mixed through it, along with a single piece of limestone that appears to have been deliberately placed to mark or close the pit's northern edge.

The discovery came during routine archaeological test-trenching carried out ahead of a housing development, the kind of precautionary excavation that has quietly transformed understanding of the Irish landscape over the past few decades. Pit-burials of this type, where cremated remains are deposited directly into a small cut in the ground rather than within an urn or under a monument, are generally associated with prehistoric funerary practice, though the absence of additional dating evidence here leaves the chronology open. What gives the find particular weight is that it was not isolated. Two other pit-burials were identified in the same general area, suggesting that this corner of Carrigaline was once part of a small funerary landscape, a cluster of the dead placed in close proximity for reasons that can only be guessed at. The excavation was reported by Sherlock in 2002.