Somewhere beneath the tarmac of the M7 motorway in County Kildare, the faint traces of a domestic life lie sealed underground, bypassed daily by thousands of drivers who have no reason to suspect they are passing over an ancient habitation site. In 2003, ahead of construction of the Heath-Mayfield section of the M7, excavators working at Lughil uncovered what archaeologists describe as hearth activities, the residual evidence of fires once lit and tended in this spot, along with post-holes and disturbed subsoil. Post-holes are exactly what they sound like, the voids left in the ground where upright timber posts once stood, often the only surviving indication that a structure of some kind existed above them. Together with the hearth evidence, they suggest that people lived and worked here, cooking, sheltering, going about ordinary life at a location that is now impossible to visit in any meaningful sense.