That layering is not metaphor; it is stratigraphy. When archaeologists lifted the packed yellow boulder clay floor of a rectangular post-medieval dwelling, they found underneath it the ash, pottery, stone axes, and flint of people who had lived on the same spot thousands of years earlier. The coincidence, as the excavators put it, was "fortuitous and surprising".

The site, known in the archaeological record as Site J, was excavated in 1945 by Professor Seán P. Ó Ríordáin, working alongside Caoimhín Ó Danachair, as part of a campaign that ran across eighteen seasons at Lough Gur, one of the most archaeologically dense landscapes in Ireland. The house itself was a substantial structure, measuring 17.3 metres north to south and 6.8 metres east to west, with an entrance doorway 1.25 metres wide set centrally in the east wall and a cobbled surface outside on the south and east sides. A central chimney breast carried two back-to-back hearths, dividing the interior into at least two rooms, while a further hearth in the west wall hints at additional subdivision. Walls projecting inward from the west side gave the building an L-shaped plan. Among the finds was North Devon Sgraffito pottery, a type of decorated earthenware imported into Ireland during the seventeenth century and often used by archaeologists as a reliable dating marker. The site does not appear on historic Ordnance Survey maps, though the foundations are clearly legible on aerial imagery from the 2000s and 2010s. Its immediate neighbours in the archaeological landscape include Stone Age enclosures and Bronze Age features, all connected by a wider field system.

The site lies in pasture in the valley between Back Hill to the west and Knockmore to the east on the Knockadoon Peninsula. It is not signposted or formally presented, and the western half of the structure remains unexcavated. Aerial images show the enclosure and house platform partially visible near a group of semi-mature trees. Visitors to Lough Gur will find the broader landscape well worth exploring, particularly for the way earthworks, field boundaries, and stone circles accumulate across the peninsula; but Site J itself is a field monument in a working pastoral landscape, best appreciated with a map reference and some patience.