At Coole in County Cork, what may have been an ancient hearth, a domestic fire site that could have told us something about the people who once lived and cooked and kept warm in that particular patch of ground, was gone before anyone had a proper chance to look at it.

The site came to light, if that is the right phrase, during the construction of the Cork to Dublin gas pipeline between 1981 and 1982. Ground works of that scale routinely disturb buried archaeology across the Irish countryside, and Coole was one such casualty. According to Cleary and colleagues, writing in 1987, the feature was identified as a possible hearth site but was destroyed before excavation could take place. What survives is a brief note and a map reference, a placeholder for something that once existed and no longer does.