To a walker crossing the ground today, there is nothing to see. Yet an aerial photograph taken in May 1977 caught the ghost of a Bronze Age house pressed into the earth as a cropmark, that faint discolouration in growing vegetation that betrays buried structure to a camera at altitude when nothing at all is visible at ground level.

Excavations carried out between 1987 and 1991 uncovered the eastern portion of what was most likely a circular building, estimated at roughly five metres in diameter. The structural evidence, as is typical for Bronze Age domestic buildings in Ireland, came not from stone walls but from the patterns left by timber: intermittent foundation trenches cut into the subsoil, post-holes marking where upright timbers once stood, and a concentric inner ring of post-holes that probably supported the roof. A gap of about one metre in the foundation trench, aligned to the east, appears to mark the entrance, a common orientation in prehistoric Irish roundhouses, perhaps for shelter from prevailing westerly wind. Just outside that entrance, excavators found an irregularly shaped pit packed with silt and large stones, its purpose unclear. Inside the building, three stake-holes and a further post-hole suggest some kind of internal fitting or furnishing, though the evidence stops short of telling us what. A radiocarbon date taken from charcoal in one of the post-pits placed the structure firmly in the late Bronze Age, calibrated to somewhere between 1050 and 947 BC. Two further houses were identified in close proximity, one approximately three metres to the north and another immediately to the south-east, suggesting that what survives at Curraghatoor is not an isolated dwelling but a fragment of a small settlement community going about its life three thousand years ago.