That is, in its quiet way, more remarkable than it might first appear. Pits of this kind, when they turn up in Irish archaeology, are often frustratingly ambiguous: they may have served as storage, as offerings, as rubbish deposits, or as features within a larger settlement whose other traces have long since vanished. What they share is a directness, a hole made deliberately by people who had reasons we can only partially reconstruct.

The pit at Scratenagh was excavated by Goorik Dehaene, with radiocarbon dating placing it firmly in the Iron Age, the period running roughly from around 600 BC into the early centuries AD in Ireland. The Iron Age in this part of the country is not always well represented in the visible landscape; it tends to leave subtler marks than the megalithic monuments of earlier millennia or the early medieval ringforts that followed. A dated pit from this period, even without further context, anchors a specific human moment to a specific piece of ground in a way that more impressive monuments sometimes fail to do.