This particular pit, uncovered at Skahanagh in County Cork, came to light not through any planned excavation but as a direct consequence of road-building, when groundworks for the N8 Rathcormac-Fermoy Bypass cut through the landscape and exposed what had lain quietly beneath it, possibly for millennia. The pit was roughly circular and contained cremated bone, the physical residue of a funerary practice that was widespread in prehistoric Ireland. Cremation burials of this kind, where the remains of the dead were placed in a simple pit with little or no accompanying material, are known from across the country, though their isolation, without a surrounding cemetery or monument to contextualise them, makes each one slightly puzzling.

What the excavation revealed was essentially a solitary act of burial. There were no reported grave goods, no enclosing ring-ditch, no cluster of other burials nearby. Just the pit, the bone, and the ground closing over both. Isolated cremation pits like this one are difficult to date without radiocarbon analysis, and the notes do not record whether such dating was carried out. The discovery was documented by Murphy in 2006 and later included in the fifth volume of the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork. The bypass construction that inadvertently uncovered it was, in its own way, a faint echo of the original act, a disturbance of ground that someone, at some unknown point in the past, had chosen as the right place to leave someone else behind.