It sat in wet pasture close to a tributary of the Camoge River, a low rise with a flat top, shaped, as the excavators put it, like an inverted saucer. There was nothing about its surface to suggest a doorway, no telltale hollow, no obvious clue that anyone had ever lived there. The working assumption going into the 1948 dig was that the ground would yield the dead. It did not.

When Ó Ríordáin and MacDermott excavated the site that year, what emerged instead was the ghost of a house. At a depth of between seventeen and twenty centimetres, a circular band of charcoal roughly six metres in diameter traced out the line of former walls, the organic residue of timber or wattle construction long since collapsed and decomposed. A further spread of charcoal near the centre marked where a hearth had once been, though unlike the nearby site of Ballingoola III there were no successive ash layers and no stones laid down to form a proper hearth base, suggesting the place was used less intensively or for a shorter period. There was no sign of rebuilding or modification. Near the entrance, where the flanking ditch terminals appeared, a scatter of flat stones had been laid to pave the approach to the doorway, a small practical detail that somehow survives as the most legible trace of whoever once crossed that threshold. The date of the house remains unresolved; neither the excavation nor subsequent record has pinned it to a period.

The site is not marked on Ordnance Survey historic maps, and aerial imagery from both 2011 to 2013 and 2018 shows nothing visible at ground level, which is broadly what you would expect from a monument defined almost entirely by subsurface charcoal. A second house of similarly indeterminate date sits roughly twelve metres to the north-east, recorded separately as LI023-066001. The area is wet pasture, so the ground underfoot is likely to be soft, particularly in winter and spring. For anyone interested in early domestic archaeology, the significance here is less about what you can see and more about what the 1948 excavation revealed: that a featureless, unassuming mound in a damp Limerick field contained the faint but legible plan of a home.