That absence is, in its own quiet way, the most interesting thing about them. They were cut into one another in a space barely 1.6 metres by 0.75 metres, each filled with the same brown-grey clay carrying flecks of charcoal, and two of them were partially destroyed by ditches before anyone had a chance to ask what they were for.

The pits came to light during large-scale archaeological monitoring of topsoil stripping across roughly 92 hectares near Clonee, carried out intermittently between December 2015 and October 2018 by P. Duffy, D. Bayle, and J. Whitaker. That monitoring exercise identified 37 locations of potential archaeological interest across the site, each of which was then investigated separately. The cluster designated Site 10 was excavated by D. Bayley under licence 16E0403. The charcoal inclusions in the fill suggest burning of some kind took place nearby, and the concentration of charcoal on the north-west side of the middle pit hints at something slightly more specific, though whether that points to a hearth, a deposit, or something else entirely remains unresolved. Without datable material, the pits could belong to almost any period of human activity in the area.