Inside it, excavators found a dark, charcoal-rich fill mixed with fragments of cremated bone, the compressed residue of a cremation burial that had been placed there at some point in the prehistoric past. Two relatively flat pieces of limestone had been set against the eastern side and base of the pit, a deliberate arrangement suggesting that whoever interred these remains thought carefully about how they should rest.

The burial came to light during test-trenching carried out in advance of a housing development, the kind of investigative work that routinely precedes construction in areas of archaeological potential in Ireland. The pit itself was modest in scale, approximately 0.35 metres long, 0.25 metres wide, and 0.15 metres deep. What lends the find particular interest is that it did not appear alone. Two further pit-burials of a closely similar character were identified in the vicinity, suggesting that this small corner of County Cork was used, at some period, as a place of repeated or communal cremation burial. Cremation pit-burials of this type are a well-attested funerary practice across prehistoric Ireland, sometimes found in clusters associated with Bronze Age activity, though the precise date of the Carrigaline examples was not established in the 2002 excavation report by Sherlock.

The site lies beneath what is now a residential area, so there is nothing visible at ground level to mark it. Its significance is preserved in the record rather than in the landscape, a reminder that the ground beneath ordinary suburban streets can carry a very long history.