Yet this shallow hollow in the ground at Clonee, County Meath, turns out to have been dug sometime between 1045 and 1225 AD, placing it squarely in the period when Norman lords were beginning to reshape the Irish landscape and Gaelic society was adjusting to the pressure. The pit itself contained two fills of grey clay and stones, along with plentiful charcoal, mostly oak with some hazel in the upper layer. No objects were found inside it. Whatever purpose it served, it left almost no trace beyond the wood ash and a radiocarbon date.

The pit came to light not through targeted excavation but through the methodical monitoring of a large-scale topsoil strip across roughly 92 hectares in the area of Clonee, Portan, and Gunnocks. The work, carried out intermittently by archaeologists P. Duffy, D. Bayle, and J. Whitaker between December 2015 and October 2018, produced 37 locations considered of potential archaeological importance. Each was subsequently examined under its own licence. The pit at Site 7 was recorded by P. Duffy under licence 16E0092. Radiocarbon dating, which works by measuring the decay of carbon-14 in organic material, returned a calibrated date range of 1045 to 1225 AD from the hazel charcoal sampled from the upper fill. The oak charcoal present alongside it is consistent with the managed woodland that would have existed across much of medieval Meath, where oak was a primary fuel and building material.