But the slot trench uncovered at Flemingtown in County Dublin represents the ground plan of a house built somewhere around 3390 BC, placing it among the earliest evidence of domestic architecture ever recorded in Ireland. The building predates the pyramids of Egypt by more than a thousand years, and yet its proportions are recognisably those of a modest family home.

The site came to light during pre-development investigations in 2005, the kind of archaeological survey that routinely precedes construction work and occasionally turns up something extraordinary. What excavators found at Flemingtown was a slot trench, a narrow channel cut into the ground to receive upright planks or posts, that traced the full footprint of the structure. This method of recording the outline of a building through its foundation trench alone is how archaeologists identify plank-built timber houses from the Neolithic, the period roughly spanning 4000 to 2500 BC when farming communities first began to establish permanent settlements across Ireland. A doorway was identified on the western side. From the fill of the trench came a substantial collection of early Neolithic pottery and struck flint, flint that had been deliberately shaped into tools by knapping. Radiocarbon dating of material from the trench returned a date of 3394 to 3387 cal. BC, a remarkably precise window into a moment more than five millennia ago. The findings were published by T. Bolger in 2009. The same site also produced evidence of activity continuing through to the early medieval period, suggesting this was a patch of ground that people returned to across thousands of years.

Flemingtown lies in north County Dublin, and the house itself no longer survives in any visible form above ground; like most Neolithic timber structures in Ireland, it is known only through excavation records. There is nothing to see at the spot today in the conventional sense. The significance of the place lives in the published record rather than in the landscape, which makes it the kind of site that rewards those who come already knowing what once stood there, however briefly, in the soil beneath their feet.