What makes it quietly remarkable is not simply its age, considerable as that is, but the fact that a later Bronze Age structure was built directly on top of its north-western half, as though the ground itself had already been understood as a place worth returning to, generation after generation.

The house was partially excavated as part of a wider investigation recorded by Doody, with the Curraghatoor structure catalogued as Structure 8 in the published report. Its walls were formed using double rows of posts and stakes set into a foundation trench roughly half a metre wide, a construction technique that involved driving timber uprights into the earth to form the skeleton of the building. Inside, excavators found a circular pit just under eighty centimetres in diameter and up to forty-four centimetres deep, a shallow oblong depression, and a scatter of stake-holes that may represent an internal fitting of some kind, perhaps a screen or partition dividing the interior space. It was charcoal recovered from that pit which yielded the radiocarbon date placing occupation firmly in the late Neolithic, a period when farming communities were well established across Ireland and timber-framed rectangular houses of this general type were among the most common forms of domestic architecture.