It is the kind of find that stops a construction project in its tracks, a quiet interruption from the distant past appearing beneath what was about to become ordinary suburban ground.

The pit was uncovered during archaeological test-trenching, the standard process of cutting exploratory trenches through a site before development begins, intended precisely to catch discoveries like this one. Measuring roughly 1.3 metres east to west, 0.9 metres across, and just over 30 centimetres deep, it held a grey-brown silty soil packed with bone fragments in part of its fill. Beneath the bone lay a single stone, about 18 centimetres long. Whether that stone was placed deliberately as a marker or base, or arrived there by other means, the record does not say. The find was reported by Sherlock in 2002, and the sparse but precise detail, the dimensions, the soil colour, the position of the stone, suggests the kind of careful field note made in the middle of a working excavation, with interpretation left for later. Pit-burials of this sort, simple earth-cut graves without elaborate structure, are known from various periods in Irish archaeology, and the bones alone, without further analysis recorded here, leave the date and identity of whoever, or whatever, was interred an open question.