Yet in 1992, during the removal of topsoil ahead of a development at Curraheen in County Cork, precisely such a feature came to light, and inside it were the cremated remains of at least one young adult, packed into dark-grey sandy soil alongside fragments of charcoal.

The pit measured roughly 0.25 metres by 0.3 metres, with a surviving depth of around 0.12 metres, meaning whatever once sat above it had long since been disturbed or eroded away. Cremation burials of this kind, where burned bone is placed directly into a cut in the ground rather than into a ceramic vessel, are known from prehistoric Ireland across a broad span of time, though without accompanying finds it is difficult to assign a precise date. What gives this particular find a quiet resonance is its setting. Approximately 60 metres to the south-east of the pit, in the same field of gently rolling pasture on a north-west-facing slope, sits a circular enclosure. Circular enclosures in the Irish landscape often functioned as ring-forts, used for settlement and livestock management from the early medieval period onward, though some have earlier origins. Whether the pit burial and the enclosure are related, separated by centuries or contemporaneous, is not recorded, but their proximity in the same field is the kind of detail that lingers.