This one in the floodplain pasture of County Limerick is remarkable for what it did not. A low earthen mound, barely distinguishable from the surrounding boggy ground, with a shallow encircling ditch and a slight central depression, it produced no artefacts, no clear structural plan, and almost no evidence of fire. Almost. A faint scattering of charcoal fragments near the centre of the mound was the only indication that anyone had ever been there at all.

The site, recorded as Ballingoola No. V, sits in wet, low-lying pasture on the floodplain of the Camoge River in Co. Limerick, roughly 200 metres south of the river, which here forms the townland boundary with Friarstown and Caherelly West. It was identified and excavated in 1949 by the archaeologist Seán P. Ó Ríordáin, whose findings were published in 1950. He found a compact mound of hard-packed yellow clay, about 11 metres in diameter from ditch centre to ditch centre, with what appeared to be a causeway interrupting the ditch on the northern side, possibly indicating an entrance. The clay of the mound and the fill of the ditch were so similar in colour and texture that separating one from the other during excavation proved almost impossible. No humus layer, no finds, nothing to date the occupation or identify its inhabitants with any precision. Ó Ríordáin concluded that the structure was probably a house of the same type as those found at nearby Ballingoola III and IV, where charcoal and burnt clay had at least left wall-traces. Because Ballingoola V had not burned, no floor plan could be recovered. He suggested the site may have seen only brief occupation, perhaps seasonal in nature.

The site does not appear on Ordnance Survey historic mapping, and by the time modern satellite imagery was captured, in orthophotos from 2011 to 2013 and again in June 2018, nothing was visible on the ground at all. The mound has effectively vanished back into the pasture. For anyone curious enough to seek it out, the surrounding landscape is flat, wet, and liable to flood, and the slight rise that once made the site marginally drier than its immediate surroundings is no longer perceptible. What remains is mostly the record itself, the patient description of a dig that found almost nothing, and the careful inference that almost nothing can sometimes still tell you something.