The pits uncovered in Rathcannon townland, County Limerick, qualify on almost none of those terms. They no longer exist in any form that can be seen, photographed, or visited. What they represent, instead, is a brief and accidental encounter with the buried past, one that would never have happened at all were it not for the routing of a gas pipeline.

In 2002, topsoil-stripping for the Bord Gáis Éireann Pipeline to the West exposed a cluster of features in Rathcannon. Ken Wiggins first identified them under licence 02E0119, and Brian Halpin subsequently excavated the site under licence 02E0394. What emerged was a single sub-oval pit measuring roughly 1.12 metres east to west by 0.61 metres, with two distinct fills: an upper layer of dark grey silty clay carrying traces of charcoal and sandstone, and a lower layer that was very rich in charcoal. Separately, two shallow pits were found side by side, aligned roughly north to south and cut into yellow and orange boulder clay. Both measured between 1.2 and 1.5 metres across, and both contained charcoal-rich, silty sandy clay mixed with burnt and heat-shattered sandstone. This combination of material is characteristic of a fulacht fiadh, a type of prehistoric burnt mound site, typically associated with outdoor cooking or water-heating using fire-cracked stones. The surrounding landscape, Halpin noted, is rich in such features. Whether these particular pits were deliberately dug or simply natural depressions that were later used is not known, and no evidence of burning in place was found within the cuts themselves. The site sat roughly 180 metres east of an existing ringfort, though the pits showed no clear association with it or with any other features nearby.

There is nothing to see at Rathcannon today. The monument has been fully excavated, it does not appear on Ordnance Survey historic mapping, and aerial imagery shows no trace of it. Its value lies entirely in the excavation record, specifically in Halpin's 2004 summary, which captures the kind of small, ambiguous, and easily overlooked feature that pipeline archaeology routinely brings to light before returning it, in a sense, to obscurity.