Recovered from one of two shallow pits at a location known as Gunnocks, the nut was submitted for radiocarbon dating and returned a calibrated date of 2200 to 1985 BC, placing it firmly in the Early Bronze Age. The pits themselves are modest to the point of near-invisibility in the archaeological record: the larger measured roughly 0.6 metres by 0.4 metres and was only 7 centimetres deep. Yet that carbonised fragment of hazel connects this otherwise unremarkable patch of ground to a moment more than four thousand years ago when someone, for reasons now entirely lost, was here.

The discovery came about through a large-scale programme of archaeological monitoring conducted by P. Duffy, D. Bayle, and J. Whitaker between December 2015 and October 2018, during which topsoil was mechanically stripped across approximately 92 hectares. Monitoring of this kind, standard practice on major development sites in Ireland, involves archaeologists watching closely as machinery removes the upper layers of soil, ready to call a halt if anything of potential significance appears. Across the full area, 37 such locations were identified and subsequently excavated. The Gunnocks pits, investigated by D. Bayley under a separate licence, were among the smallest and least dramatic of those sites. One pit contained grey silty clay and stones; the other, which may have cut into the first, held a similar fill along with a low concentration of hazel and ash charcoal. It was from this charcoal assemblage that the solitary hazelnut fragment came, submitted under sample reference FTMC-HR36-18 and analysed as part of the wider project reported by Duffy, Fairhead, and Fleeshouven in 2021.