The Iron Age round house at Coolbeg in County Wicklow left almost nothing above ground to betray its presence. What remained were shallow concentric rings of post-holes pressed into the subsoil, only visible once modern machinery had stripped away the topsoil layer, and easily lost had nobody been watching.

The structure came to light in 2008 during monitoring of a topsoil-stripping operation, carried out under Excavation Licence 07E1151. What archaeologists found was a double-ring round house, a type of circular timber dwelling where two concentric rings of upright posts supported a thatched or turf roof, measuring roughly 8.5 metres in diameter. The post-holes were described as very shallow, meaning the posts had left only faint impressions, which speaks both to the age of the structure and to how close it had come to being erased entirely. At the centre was a hearth, the functional and social core of any such dwelling, and to the south-east a porch or vestibule, an entrance arrangement that would have offered some shelter from the prevailing weather before one stepped inside. This orientation of the entrance is a detail worth noting: south-east-facing doorways appear with some regularity in Irish prehistoric round houses, though whether this reflects practical, ritual, or purely conventional concerns remains a matter of debate among researchers. The findings were later published by Frazer in 2011.