Yet what was found within this shallow depression on a slope in County Tipperary, sealed under centuries of soil, amounts to a quietly remarkable act of burial: cremated human bone, dense charcoal, dark silty clay, and at the very base of the pit, a single fragment of a chert flake. Chert is a fine-grained sedimentary rock worked by prehistoric peoples into cutting tools and strike-points, and its deliberate placement, or at least its presence, at the bottom of the deposit gives the whole arrangement an air of intention that is hard to dismiss.

The pit came to light during excavation of a roughly 40 by 40 metre area ahead of construction work on the N8 Cashel Bypass and the N74 Link Road South. The ground in question slopes southward from a small lake, and the excavation, documented by O'Flanagan in 2004, showed that this was no isolated spot. A second pit-burial lay just eight metres to the north-north-east. Beyond these two burials, the excavated area also contained a scatter of pits and post-holes suggestive of sustained occupation or activity, a kiln located roughly ten metres south of the lake, and the trough of a fulacht fia near the eastern edge of the site. A fulacht fia is a type of prehistoric cooking or processing site, typically identified by a fire-cracked stone mound and a water trough, and they are among the most commonly found prehistoric features in the Irish landscape. Together, these elements point to a patch of ground that was used repeatedly and in varied ways by people who have left almost no other trace.