On the face of it, there is almost nothing to say about the finds at Site 33, Portan, Co. Meath, and yet that blankness is itself a kind of puzzle. Something burned here, or something involving fire was deposited here, and whoever did it left no object behind that might tell us who they were or when they lived.

The pits came to light during a large-scale programme of archaeological monitoring that ran intermittently from December 2015 to October 2018, as the topsoil was stripped from roughly 92 hectares of land in the Clonee, Portan, and Gunnocks area of County Meath. Archaeologists P. Duffy, D. Bayle, and J. Whitaker identified 37 locations across that area that warranted closer attention. Site 33 was one of them. Excavation under licence 17E0205 revealed an oval pit measuring 1.5 metres north to south and 0.6 metres east to west, sunk to a depth of just 0.09 metres. A smaller circular pit, around 0.5 metres in diameter and marginally deeper at 0.11 metres, sat immediately to the south. Both contained the same kind of fill: dark, charcoal-flecked soil suggesting repeated or sustained contact with fire, or the disposal of burnt material. Without artefacts, and without organic material suitable for radiocarbon dating, the features remain suspended in time, possibly prehistoric, possibly not.