In February 2006, a drop in the level of Poulaphuca Reservoir on the Wicklow and Kildare border exposed the western shoreline, and with it the ghostly outline of a dwelling that had last seen open air several thousand years earlier. What emerged on a gentle slope of former agricultural land, overlooking the King's River, was the foundation trace of a nearly square building, roughly 6.6 metres north to south and 6.2 metres east to west. The outline survives not as stone or timber but as a slot-trench, the channel dug to hold the building's upright posts, now readable only through its fill of burnt clays and charcoal-rich soil.

The reservoir was created in the 1930s and 1940s to serve the Liffey hydroelectric scheme, submerging a significant stretch of the river valley and the farmland around it. Whatever lay beneath the water before that flooding had remained effectively invisible. Once the 2006 exposure confirmed the site's significance, intermittent excavations followed under licence whenever the water level dropped far enough to permit access. Those investigations recovered a substantial quantity of Neolithic pottery alongside a flint axe, placing the structure firmly in the period roughly 4000 to 2500 BC, when communities across Ireland were beginning to farm, build rectangular timber houses, and produce distinctive ceramics. Particularly notable among the finds was a Bann flake, a type of broad, leaf-shaped flint tool associated with earlier Mesolithic traditions, which the excavators considered possibly ritually deposited rather than lost by accident, suggesting the site may have carried some ceremonial significance beyond its domestic function.