Yet it is precisely the ordinariness of what was uncovered at Portan, Co. Meath, that gives it a quiet archaeological interest. The pit contained two layers of silty clay, grey-yellow beneath and black-grey above, both flecked with charcoal. The lower layer also held burnt bone and burnt clay, suggesting that whatever activity produced those materials happened before the pit was filled, or elsewhere entirely, with the residue deposited rather than generated on the spot. There was no scorching of the pit's sides or base, so no fire burned within it.

The pit came to light during a large-scale topsoil-stripping exercise covering approximately 92 hectares in the Clonee, Portan, and Gunnocks area of Co. Meath, carried out intermittently between December 2015 and October 2018. Archaeologists P. Duffy, D. Bayle, and J. Whitaker monitored the stripping and identified 37 locations of potential archaeological importance across the wider area. This particular feature, recorded as Site 17 by D. Bayley under excavation licence 16E0194, was one of dozens that received further investigation. No dating evidence was recovered from the pit, so it is impossible to say whether it belongs to the Bronze Age, the early medieval period, or some other era entirely. That absence of a date is itself informative: the pit leaves a question open rather than closing one.