There is no earthwork, no standing stone, no trace visible from the air. What lies here was found almost by accident, and only because a sewage scheme needed a route through the valley at Hermitage, in County Limerick.

The discovery came during archaeological testing in 2001, when work on the Castleconnell Sewerage Scheme required an advance strip of topsoil along its way-leave corridor, the strip of land granted for laying the infrastructure. Excavation under licence number 01E0319, reported by Collins in 2001, revealed a burnt spread, the kind of feature archaeologists describe when they encounter a concentrated deposit of heat-fractured stone and charcoal that suggests repeated burning activity in a fixed spot. Such features are often associated with fulacht fiadh, Bronze Age cooking or industrial sites where water was heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into a trough, though the notes here stop short of making that identification. The deposit, designated C35, was a moderate dark brown sandy clay laced with burnt stone and charcoal flecks, sitting just ten centimetres deep. More intriguing still was what turned up in the spoil-heaps and way-leave inspection: several axe fragments, 71 pieces of worked flint, and 116 of chert, a fine-grained stone worked in a similar way to flint. That quantity of knapped stone suggests human activity in this valley going back considerably further than any sewage scheme. An ancient fording point on the Shannon lies roughly eighty metres to the north-east, which is the sort of proximity that rarely turns out to be coincidental. As of the record compiled by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly in June 2020, artefact analysis and dating were still in progress.

There is, in practical terms, nothing to see at this location. The site sits in ordinary farmland, carries no marker, does not appear on the Ordnance Survey's historic mapping, and leaves no surface impression detectable even on aerial photography. Its interest lies precisely in that invisibility: a concentrated scatter of prehistoric stone tools and a patch of burning, quietly preserved beneath a working field beside one of Ireland's great rivers, found only because a pipe needed to go in the ground.