In 2001, excavations carried out ahead of the N8 Glanmire-Watergrasshill Bypass in County Cork uncovered the ghost of a timber roundhouse at Killydonoghoe, visible not as standing walls but as a circle of post-holes pressed into the earth, the only surviving evidence of a structure that once sheltered people somewhere between 1211 and 919 BC. The house was modest in scale, roughly six metres across, with a central hearth whose scorched, gritty fills suggest repeated use, and what appears to have been an entrance facing southeast.

Among the finds recovered from the post-holes were a broken whetstone and several sherds of Beaker pottery. Beaker pottery, a type of finely made, decorated ceramic associated with communities across Atlantic Europe from around 2400 BC onward, would ordinarily be a significant marker of period and culture. Here, though, its presence is complicated: the pottery pre-dates the house by several centuries and was clearly not sitting where it had originally been deposited, but had instead found its way, by some unknown route, into association with the considerably later Bronze Age structure. The oak charcoal used to date the house placed its construction firmly in the middle Bronze Age, making the pottery an intriguing piece of residual material rather than a straightforward clue to the site's history. A later hearth at the north edge of the structure suggests at least one further phase of occupation or activity on the same spot. To the west lay a series of grain-storage pits, and two pit-burials were identified nearby, one roughly forty metres to the north and another two hundred and ten metres to the south, hinting at a broader landscape of settlement and perhaps ritual use that the bypass corridor only partially revealed.