Yet those absences, read together, describe a dwelling with a diameter of roughly 4.5 by 5 metres, circular in plan, the kind of roundhouse that would have been a familiar domestic form during the late Bronze Age in Ireland. A posthole, for the uninitiated, is simply the pit dug to seat a structural timber, and when the wood rots away over three thousand years, what remains is the filled void, sometimes preserving organic material that the original builders could never have imagined anyone would one day analyse.

The site at Clonard came to light not through targeted archaeological survey but through the more prosaic business of road construction. Excavation was carried out under licence number 08E053 in advance of the development, and this structure was one of two uncovered in the same area, the second recorded separately. It was charred cereal grain recovered from within the posthole fills that provided the dating evidence: radiocarbon analysis returned a calibrated range of 997 to 843 BC, placing the building firmly in the late Bronze Age. The grain itself is a small, incidental detail, the kind of thing that ends up carbonised near a hearth or during some routine domestic mishap, and yet it is precisely that accident of preservation that ties the structure to a specific window in prehistory. The findings were published by McLoughlin in 2009.

There is nothing to see at the surface today. Rescue excavations of this kind, carried out ahead of development, are by their nature destructive; the archaeology is recorded and then the ground is built over or disturbed. The value of the site lies entirely in the published record and in what it adds to the broader picture of late Bronze Age settlement in the Dublin area. Anyone with an interest in the period would do better to follow up through the excavation report or through the Sites and Monuments Record entry than to visit the location itself, where no trace of the structure remains visible.