At Ballybrowney in County Cork, the building of the N8 Rathcormac-Fermoy Bypass in 2003 sliced through the eastern half of a roughly circular Bronze Age enclosure, revealing a settlement that had lain undisturbed in the soil for thousands of years. The western portion of the enclosure remained untouched outside the road corridor and was never excavated, meaning the site was partially examined and then, in effect, buried again in a different sense entirely.

What the excavation uncovered was a fosse, that is a deliberately dug ditch used to define or defend a boundary, curving for around 37.6 metres from north-north-east to south-south-west. It was just over a metre wide and reached a maximum depth of one metre. Near the northern end, the fosse stopped short of the excavation boundary by about 1.5 metres, leaving an uncut strip of ground that archaeologists interpreted as a probable entrance causeway. Inside the outer fosse ran a second, shallower concentric ditch, only about 0.2 metres deep, suggesting the interior was more carefully organised than the modest dimensions might imply. Pottery sherds recovered from the fill of the outer ditch confirmed a Bronze Age date for the site. Within the enclosed space, traces of two probable structures were identified, one of them sitting directly over the northern end of the inner fosse, indicating that the layout of the settlement shifted or developed over time. As if to emphasise how significant this small patch of ground once was, two further Bronze Age enclosures were found nearby, one roughly 20 metres to the south-east and another about 50 metres to the east, pointing to a cluster of activity in this part of Cork during the Bronze Age rather than an isolated homestead.