That is, in a sense, precisely what makes it interesting. Somewhere beneath reclaimed pasture in County Limerick, people once lived, left traces, and vanished from the landscape so completely that no mark of their presence ever made it onto Ordnance Survey historic maps. The site does not appear on aerial imagery. It exists now almost entirely as a footnote in an archaeological report.

The habitation site came to light not through any dedicated survey but as a consequence of infrastructure work. In 1986, archaeologist Margaret Gowen excavated the site during the construction of the Bruff-Mallow gas pipeline, when ground-disturbance along the route made archaeological monitoring necessary. The monument was catalogued as site 1/5/3 in Gowen's subsequent 1988 publication, a dry reference number that is now effectively all that anchors this place to the record. The excavation was full and complete, meaning that whatever structural or material evidence survived was recovered and recorded at that time. Nothing was left in the ground to revisit.

For anyone drawn to the archaeology of absence, Mountblakeney is an instructive case. The reclaimed pasture that now covers the area gives no indication of what was once present, and because the site was fully excavated rather than partially investigated and backfilled, there is no subsurface remainder to detect. Visitors interested in pipeline archaeology of this period might find Gowen's 1988 report the more rewarding destination; the physical location, somewhere in the farmland between Bruff and Mallow, offers nothing visible above ground. That is not unusual for sites of this kind, but it is a useful reminder that the Irish landscape holds a great many places where history was present, recorded, and then carefully erased by the work of recovering it.