Yet what makes this particular feature at Cloongullaun quietly interesting is precisely its ambiguity. Roughly one metre across and barely twenty centimetres deep, it would be entirely invisible to anyone walking the field today, and it only came to light because a road realignment scheme along the N26 triggered an obligatory programme of trial trenching before the diggers moved in.

The trenching, carried out in 2019 under licence 19E0201 and reported by Gillespie, revealed a subcircular cut, curving on its western side but with noticeably straighter edges to the north-east and south-east. It was dug into subsoil roughly half a metre below the present ground surface, and its fill told a modest but suggestive story: broken angular sandstones, possibly heat-affected, packed into a loose, dark, charcoal-flecked peaty clay. That combination of scorched-looking stone and charcoal-rich soil is the kind of signature archaeologists associate with burning activity, perhaps a small hearth feature, a cooking pit, or some other localised use of fire, though the record stops short of saying so definitively. Pits of this type, filled with fire-cracked stone, are found across Ireland in a variety of periods, and without further dating evidence the age of this one remains open.