There are no standing stones here, no earthworks or enclosures, just a scatter of shaped flint that might easily pass for ordinary river gravel to the untrained eye.

The site at Connaberry came to light during a field-study project carried out between 1983 and 1985. Among the finds was a slug knife, a type of flint tool named for its rounded, elongated form, and a bifacially worked flake, meaning a piece of flint that has been shaped by striking flakes from both faces, which may have functioned as a projectile point, the tip of an arrow or a spear. Professor P.C. Woodman, a specialist in Irish prehistory, attributed the assemblage to the Neolithic or Early Bronze Age, placing it somewhere in a broad window between roughly 4000 and 1500 BC. That range matters: it spans the transition from farming communities who cleared forests and built megalithic tombs, to the earliest metal-using societies on the island. A handful of flint cannot tell us which world these particular people inhabited, but it confirms that the Blackwater corridor was a route through which people passed and paused, as rivers so often were.