No finds came out of it, no fragments of burnt bone, no tools or pottery. What archaeologists did recover, in 1986, was the ghost of a carefully constructed wooden lining, a bowl-shaped cavity that someone had taken considerable trouble to build and then, apparently, to burn, for reasons that remain entirely opaque.

The pit at Duntryleague, catalogued as site TR/2/16/4a, came to light during the excavation of the Bórd Gáis Éireann Curraleigh to West-Limerick gas pipeline. Eoin Grogan led the excavation that year, and the results were published in a 1988 volume compiled by M. Gowen. By the time archaeologists reached it, the upper portion and northern side had already been removed by pipeline trenching, so what survived was a section roughly 70 centimetres in diameter and 35 centimetres deep. The profile was bowl-shaped, with a distinctive overhanging lip, and around the interior edges below that lip were the charred remains of upright timbers forming a roughly circular wooden core about 40 centimetres across. Only about 5 centimetres of that timber lining survived. A single stake hole was found at the base, positioned just beneath the southern edge of the planked core. The fill was recorded in four distinct lenses, all burnt and heavily flecked with charcoal. Despite this clear evidence of deliberate burning, there were no objects recovered and no traces of cremated bone, which might otherwise suggest a funerary function. A second Bronze Age pit has been recorded approximately 30 metres to the east, though it too leaves little on the surface to indicate its presence.

This is not a site that rewards a visit in any conventional sense. It does not appear on the older Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, and aerial imagery from the 2011 to 2013 period shows no surface trace whatsoever. The field it occupies sits around 30 metres east of the townland boundary with Newtown, in pasture that gives nothing away. Its significance is less visual than conceptual: somewhere underfoot, a Bronze Age structure was built with evident care, set alight, and left, its purpose unrecorded and, for now at least, unrecoverable.