Before the road came through in 2005, archaeologists uncovered the ground plan of a rectangular Neolithic dwelling at Gortore, Co. Cork, measuring roughly six metres long by five metres wide. What makes it quietly remarkable is not its size but its specificity: this was not a ritual monument or a burial site, but a home, and the traces left behind are domestic in a way that feels almost uncomfortably familiar.

The structure was defined by foundation trenches and main upright posts, with a substantial post-hole midway along the southern wall that the excavator, O'Donoghue, interpreted as evidence of an off-centre entrance. A spread of redeposited clay running northward from that probable doorway into the interior is thought to represent a floor surface. A single internal post-hole likely held a roof support, while several post-holes positioned just outside the walls suggest the roof extended outward beyond them, eave-like, braced by external uprights. Among the finds were five flint flakes and two carinated bowls, a type of early Neolithic pottery characterised by a sharply angled shoulder partway up the vessel, used across Atlantic Europe during the fourth millennium BC. Plant remains recovered from the site included a typical early Neolithic cereal assemblage and fragments of charred apple. Radiocarbon dating of charcoal from the house placed its use between approximately 3928 and 3655 cal. BC, placing it firmly in the early Neolithic period, when farming communities were first establishing themselves across Ireland.

The site itself is no longer accessible, having been built over during motorway construction. What survives is the record of the excavation, and the small but telling inventory of objects and organic material that allows us to picture someone crossing a slightly off-centre threshold into a clay-floored room, setting down a bowl, and leaving behind, entirely without intention, the seeds of an apple.