The site at Banemore came to light not through a planned research excavation but through the kind of accidental encounter that archaeology in Ireland so often depends upon: groundworks for the Limerick Main Drainage Scheme brought it to the surface, and what had been quietly preserved under the soil for three millennia was suddenly, briefly, visible.

Excavation was carried out by Edmond O'Donovan under licence 00E0506, and the results revealed a compact but telling picture of Bronze Age occupation. Within an area measuring 33 metres east to west and 17 metres north to south, forty-eight features were recorded: nineteen post-holes, eighteen pits, ten stake-holes, and a linear ditch bisecting the site. Post-holes and stake-holes are the buried traces of upright timbers, the kind that once formed the walls and roof supports of a structure, and the pattern left behind here was coherent enough that post-excavation analysis allowed archaeologists to propose a building plan. That building measured 12.7 metres east to west and 5 metres north to south. The pits were shallow and flat-based, averaging roughly 1.2 by 1.1 metres across and only 0.3 metres deep. Five had been deliberately backfilled with heat-shattered sandstone and fragments of burnt animal bone, while six showed evidence of burning in place. Radiocarbon dating of charcoal from one pit placed occupation at the site between 1253 and 1003 BC, firmly within the Irish Middle Bronze Age. The site had already suffered some damage before excavation: topsoil stripping carried out in preparation for the construction of Rathbane golf course had truncated many of the features.

The site itself is not accessible or marked in any conventional sense; it lies in the vicinity of Rathbane, south of Limerick city, and nothing visible remains above ground. Its significance sits in the archive and the published record rather than the landscape. For those interested in pursuing the detail, the excavation is documented at www.excavations.ie and in O'Donovan's 2002 publication. The Banemore site is a reminder that Bronze Age domestic life in the Shannon region was not confined to the obvious monuments, the ring-forts and cairns, but was woven into ordinary ground that infrastructure projects continue to uncover.