That kind of layered occupation, one building literally truncating a predecessor, speaks to a place that people returned to over generations, not a temporary camp but somewhere with a pull.

The three houses came to light in 2004 during excavations carried out ahead of the construction of the Mitchelstown inner relief road, a circumstance that is unfortunately common in Irish archaeology: the groundwork for modern infrastructure revealing what lies beneath. The house in question was roughly subcircular in plan, measuring about 9.7 metres north to south and 8.5 metres east to west. Its walls were traced through a shallow slot-trench, a narrow channel cut into the ground to receive upright timbers or walling material, accompanied by an internal ring of nine post-holes. A second slot-trench running north to south inside the structure, with post-holes at each end, appears to have formed a dividing wall, creating a narrower eastern space roughly two metres wide just inside an east-facing entrance about a metre across. In the larger western compartment, a small patch of burnt clay almost certainly marks where the hearth once sat. Radiocarbon dating of charcoal recovered from the internal partition wall returned dates of 1493 to 1475 cal. BC and 1462 to 1305 cal. BC, placing occupation firmly in the Middle Bronze Age, somewhere around 3,400 years ago. A dense cluster of stake-holes found where all three houses overlapped suggests even earlier, more transient activity on the same spot before any of the standing structures were built. The excavation findings were reported by Claire Cotter in 2007 and 2008.