It was a sand-and-gravel extraction operation that brought these buildings to light, which is perhaps the least likely way to stumble upon a Neolithic settlement. In 1997, archaeological monitoring of soil-stripping at Corbally, Co. Kildare, revealed the foundations of three houses that had stood on this patch of ground around six thousand years ago. They were not monumental structures in the way that megalithic tombs tend to dominate our picture of the Irish Neolithic; they were domestic, built to be lived in, with hearths, divided rooms, and carefully dug foundation trenches into which timber posts and planks were slotted to form the walls.

The three houses were subsequently fully excavated, and the detail that emerged is striking. The largest, known as House 1, was trapezoidal in plan, roughly eleven metres long and nearly seven metres wide, narrowing toward the south-east end where the doorway seems to have been. Inside, a substantial foundation trench divided the building into two main chambers, with a third, smaller space partitioned off by shallower trenches. Two large hearths sat centrally in the biggest chamber. Radiocarbon dating placed this structure at around 3995 BC, making it one of the earlier examples of Neolithic domestic architecture known in Ireland. House 2, a similar trapezoidal form and only three metres away, dates to around 3685 BC; House 3, the smallest of the group and roughly subrectangular in plan, had its own central hearth and aisled interior supported by roof-bearing post-holes. Among the finds recovered across all three were sherds of Western Neolithic pottery, the round-bottomed shouldered bowls characteristic of early farming communities in Ireland, along with worked flint, chert, quartz, and serpentine, saddle querns used for grinding grain, hammer stones, and fragments of polished stone axes. A further excavation around a hundred metres to the south, carried out in 2001, uncovered three more Neolithic houses at the same site, suggesting that Corbally was not a lone farmstead but something closer to a small farming settlement, its traces preserved by accident just beneath the surface of a Kildare field.