Beneath what is now a stretch of County Kildare road corridor, a small cluster of charcoal stains and possible post-holes once marked the outline of a building that no one had looked at in a very long time. The site was not discovered through deliberate excavation but through the more prosaic process of topsoil-stripping for the Celbridge Interchange, a road scheme running roughly four kilometres between Celbridge and Leixlip. When archaeologists began monitoring the stripped ground in April 2001, they were not expecting much. They found eighteen potential sites before the year was out.

This particular site, catalogued as Site 12, measured fifteen metres by eight. Five concentrations of charcoal were identified across the area, four of them arranged in an arc towards the south-east, with a fifth lying to the north-west. Each concentration was modest in scale, ranging from 0.2 to 0.5 metres in diameter, and they are interpreted as possible post-holes, the kind of shallow pits that once held the upright timbers of a structure. Post-holes are among the most understated of archaeological features; without the wood they once supported, they survive only as discolourations in the soil, outlines of something domestic and long vanished. No date is recorded for when those timbers stood. The wider landscape through which the road scheme passed is telling in its own way, since the southern section runs through countryside shaped by eighteenth-century estate planning, with avenues and woodland radiating from Castletown, an early eighteenth-century house that remains one of the more substantial Palladian buildings in Ireland. Whatever this habitation site once was, it predates that designed landscape entirely, belonging to a different order of occupation on the same ground.