One of these, an oval structure at Ballybrowney, is quietly remarkable not for its scale but for the level of domestic deliberation its remains suggest. Before it was buried again beneath tarmac and traffic, it offered a rare, close-up view of how people organised their living space in prehistoric Ireland.

The house was excavated in 2003 as part of a programme of archaeological work carried out ahead of the bypass construction, and it formed one of a group of three broadly contemporaneous houses uncovered at the same site. The oval structure measured approximately 6.9 metres east to west and 5.5 metres north to south, its outline defined by a slot-trench, the kind of narrow foundation channel into which timber wall posts would have been set. Five internal post-holes survived, though tree-root disturbance had likely destroyed at least one more and damaged part of the trench line. What makes the building particularly interesting is the attention given to its entrance, which faced south-south-east. Two substantial post-holes marked the threshold, and beyond them a short porch-like projection, roughly 0.7 metres long, extended outward, formed by two trenches ending in further post-holes. Inside the doorway, two smaller post-holes may indicate yet another layer of internal elaboration around the entrance passage. The excavator, reporting in 2006, noted that while the three houses differed in some details, they were broadly similar in form, and one of the group was directly dated to the Bronze Age.

The site itself no longer exists as a visible feature; it was excavated in advance of construction precisely because the road would destroy it. What remains is the record of a household that took care over how people moved in and out, a small architectural choice made sometime in the Bronze Age on a patch of Cork ground that most drivers now pass over without a second thought.