Yet the handful of charcoal fragments recovered from its fill connect it to a moment somewhere between 1958 and 1752 BC, placing it at the tail end of the Early Bronze Age, when the landscape of the Irish midlands was being cleared, farmed, and quietly marked by people whose other traces here have largely vanished.

The pit came to light during a prolonged programme of archaeological monitoring that accompanied topsoil stripping across a large development area of roughly 92 hectares at Gunnocks, Co. Meath, carried out intermittently between December 2015 and October 2018 by P. Duffy, D. Bayle, and J. Whitaker. The work identified 37 locations of potential archaeological interest across the wider area, each of which was then investigated under its own excavation licence. At the location designated Site 5a, excavation directed by P. Duffy revealed the pit alongside a larger cut feature, roughly 2.65 metres by 1.7 metres, interpreted as the ghost of a tree bole, the void left in the ground when the root mass of a substantial tree rots away or is removed. About 15 metres to the east, two smaller pits sat side by side, their fills a mix of yellow, grey, and black clays with silts, and scattered inclusions of charcoal and stone. It was a fragment of alder charcoal from the largest pit that was sent for radiocarbon dating, returning the Early Bronze Age result that gives the site its significance. Alder tends to favour wet or waterlogged ground, and its presence here, however fragmentary, hints at the kind of environment that surrounded these people and the wood they had to hand.