Before any excavation began, a series of large surface stones arranged roughly east to west, stretching about six metres, was enough to suggest something deliberate beneath the grass on the southern slope of Knockadoon, on the eastern shore of Lough Gur in County Limerick. What made the site peculiar was what the digging failed to reveal: archaeologists had hoped the stones were the visible portion of a complete house plan waiting underground, but when the excavation was finished, what lay exposed was more or less what had always been visible. The ground had offered up its secrets only partially, and what remained was a fragmentary picture of domestic life reaching back thousands of years.

Known as Site B, this prehistoric house site, registered as National Monument No. 247, was excavated by the archaeologist Seán P. Ó Ríordáin in the late 1940s. His work revealed evidence for at least two buildings and three successive floor levels, suggesting the site was occupied, abandoned, and reoccupied over time. The surviving features included post-holes along the southern and eastern sides that indicated a roughly rectangular structure, and a shallow trench in the clay, between about twelve and eighteen centimetres deep, that terminated in a larger rectangular post-hole nearly half a metre down. Ó Ríordáin interpreted this trench as a possible wall groove for a wooden wall, though he could not confirm whether it belonged to the same building as the stone elements. Natural rock outcrops across the site complicated matters further, as these may have been incorporated into the walls in place of cut stone, giving the plan an irregular quality. A central hearth was also identified. The pottery recovered was almost entirely Neolithic in character, the period broadly spanning from around 4000 to 2500 BC in Ireland, a time when settled farming communities were establishing themselves across the landscape.

The site sits forty-five metres north of the present shoreline of Lough Gur, on a south-facing slope within one of the most densely concentrated areas of prehistoric remains in the country. There is no dramatic reconstruction or signage marking the spot, and a visitor without prior knowledge might walk past it entirely. Aerial photography has shown a cluster of white stones that appears to correspond to the excavated area, which may serve as a rough guide when approaching from the lake side. The broader Lough Gur landscape rewards slow, attentive movement; the monument here is less about visible grandeur and more about reading absence, working out from a scatter of stones and a few shallow depressions what a Neolithic family might once have called home.