What eventually became a sand-and-gravel extraction pit in County Kildare turned out, in 1997, to be something considerably older: the site of a Neolithic farming settlement dating back roughly six thousand years. Routine archaeological monitoring of soil-stripping at Corbally identified the foundations of three timber houses, which were then fully excavated. Their discovery was not the result of a dedicated search for ancient remains, but rather the kind of accidental revelation that development groundwork occasionally produces, and it delivered one of the more complete pictures of Neolithic domestic life found anywhere in Ireland.

All three houses were built using post-and-plank walls set into substantial foundation trenches, a construction method that indicates a degree of permanence and organised effort well beyond the temporary shelters one might associate with early prehistoric peoples. House 1, the largest, was trapezoidal in plan, roughly eleven metres long and nearly seven metres wide, narrowing toward the south-east end where the entrance is thought to have been. It was divided internally into two main chambers and a smaller third space, with large roof-supporting post-holes and two hearths placed centrally in the principal chamber. Radiocarbon dating puts its construction at around 3995 BC, placing it firmly in the early fourth millennium. House 2 was similarly trapezoidal and nearly as large, also with its entrance at the narrower south-east end, and dating to around 3685 BC. House 3 was the smallest of the group, subrectangular rather than trapezoidal, with a single large central hearth. Finds recovered across the three structures included sherds of round-bottomed, shouldered bowl pottery of the type archaeologists call Western Neolithic, along with flint, chert, quartz and serpentine tools, saddle querns used for grinding grain, hammer stones, and broken fragments of polished stone axes. The saddle querns in particular point to settled agricultural activity; these are heavy grinding stones, not the equipment of people moving frequently across the landscape. Subsequent investigation identified three further Neolithic houses approximately one hundred metres to the south, suggesting that what survives at Corbally is not an isolated dwelling but part of a broader settlement cluster.