What drew attention to this small patch of ground near Puckaun in North Tipperary was not antiquarian curiosity but a bulldozer, and what it turned up in June 1954 was human bone.

The Land Rehabilitation Project, a post-war government scheme to bring marginal and waterlogged land back into agricultural use, had set machinery to work on a natural rise of ground at Ballyhogan. The raised area was roughly twenty metres across and showed no trace of the bank or surrounding fosse that would normally mark out a rath, the circular earthwork enclosure commonly called a ringfort. When archaeologist Breandán Ó Ríordáin investigated, he found human remains from several individuals scattered across the surface, along with frequent small stones, but no grave structures of any kind. The only object recovered was a large, square-headed iron nail that appeared to adhere to a fragment of bone. Locally, the place was called Kilwarig, and it carried a tradition of being a killeen, the informal term for a burial ground used for unbaptised children, who were excluded by Church practice from consecrated cemeteries. The presence of adult remains, however, complicated that identification. In the same field, traces of a possible fulacht fiadh were also noted; these are ancient cooking sites, typically identified by a mound of fire-cracked stone beside a trough or pit, and they are found widely across Ireland. The natural rise has since been entirely levelled, the field boundary that once skirted its south-eastern edge removed, and nothing of the site now survives above ground.