That detail, small and domestic, is also one of the stranger things about the site at Ballyvally: a building long gone above ground, its wooden posts rotted away entirely, yet legible enough in the soil to tell us how people moved through it, where they sat, and what they may have carried in their pockets.

The house came to light during excavations by O'Kelly in 1962, carried out inside a ringfort, the circular earthwork enclosure that was a common form of enclosed farmstead in early medieval Ireland. The structure sat in the western portion of the ringfort interior, about six metres from the bank, and was modest in scale, roughly four metres by two and a half. It was built from wooden posts, with a doorway at the south-west corner just over a metre wide, and two forward-set posts indicated a small protecting porch, reached by the polished flagstone passage. Inside, a central hearth was backed by a narrow upright stone. What lifts the site out of the ordinary is what the excavation turned up in and around it. Beside the hearth lay a Hiberno-Norse coin dating to around 1070, the kind of currency that circulated in the Norse-influenced towns of early medieval Ireland, particularly Dublin. A slate trial piece, a small worked fragment used to practise or test a design, was found in the porch. A second coin, dating to around 1035, and two bronze pins came from a large pit to the east of the house, nearly two metres deep. The coins together suggest the house was in use sometime in the eleventh century, though the worn flagstones imply occupation stretched across a considerable period before or after those dates.