A single cremation burial, small enough to fit within a space roughly the size of a dinner plate and barely deeper than a hand-width, was uncovered in 2002 during groundwork for the Bord Gáis Éireann Pipeline to the West. Its unremarkable appearance in the soil belied something genuinely unusual: the cremated bone inside had not been crushed before burial. Across the broader pipeline project, which turned up dozens of similar features, the standard practice appears to have been to grind cremated remains down before depositing them. Here, recognisable anatomical pieces survived intact, sitting in an ashy lower layer within the tiny oval cut. That divergence from the norm is quietly striking.

The site was first identified in 2002 by Ken Wiggins during topsoil-stripping operations, as one of six related archaeological features flagged under the pipeline survey reference BGE 3/77/27-29. It was subsequently excavated by Kate Taylor under licence No. 02E0470. The burial itself consisted of two distinct fills: an upper layer rich in charcoal and fragments of charred twigs, suggesting material raked in from a pyre, and a lower layer of ash containing the cremated bone. Radiocarbon dating placed the burial in the Early to Middle Bronze Age, somewhere between 2030 and 1520 cal BC, a period when cremation was a widespread funerary practice across Ireland and Britain. The site had never appeared on Ordnance Survey historic maps, and an enclosure of unknown date lies around 90 metres to the west, though any connection between the two features remains unestablished.

There is nothing to see at Ballincurra now. The monument has been fully excavated, the ground returned to pasture, and no trace appears on aerial imagery. The interest lies entirely in the archaeological record rather than in any physical visit. Taylor's summary of the findings was published in 2004, and the site sits about 30 metres south of a small stream, in farmland with no public access or formal marking. For those interested in Bronze Age burial archaeology, the significance is in the detail: a small, overlooked pit that quietly broke the pattern shared by almost every comparable grave found along the same pipeline route.