During the stripping of approximately 92 hectares of ground at Clonee in County Meath, carried out intermittently between December 2015 and October 2018, archaeologists identified 37 locations worth investigating further. One of them, designated Site 9, yielded a pit so modest it would fit comfortably inside a dinner plate: 0.6 metres across and barely 8 centimetres deep.

What made the pit worth pausing over was its contents. The single fill of mid to dark grey clay carried a notably high concentration of charcoal, dominated by alder with some fruitwood mixed in. Alder was widely used in early medieval Ireland, valued for burning and for working in wet conditions, and its presence alongside fruitwood suggests something deliberate rather than accidental. A radiocarbon date obtained from a fragment of the alder charcoal returned a calibrated range of 1053 to 1263 AD, placing the deposit squarely in the later part of Ireland's medieval period. The excavation at this site was carried out by D. Bailey under licence 16E0118, as part of a broader programme led by P. Duffy, D. Bayle, and J. Whitaker across the wider Clonee, Portan, and Gunnocks area. The results were drawn together in a 2021 report by Duffy, Fairhead, and Fleeshouven for Irish Archaeological Consultancy.

The pit itself is long gone, recorded and then lost again beneath whatever came after the topsoil stripping. Its significance lies less in what it was, which may never be fully understood, and more in what it represents: the kind of small, ordinary, medieval activity that rarely survives at all, and that only emerges when large-scale groundwork happens to pass through the right few centimetres of earth.