Yet that is precisely what was found at Tullerboy in County Limerick in 2002, when groundworks for Bord Gáis Éireann's Pipeline to the West cut through a gently sloping plain and exposed what turned out to be a cluster of prehistoric remains that had gone entirely undetected until that moment.

The site was excavated as part of a wider programme of archaeological investigation along the pipeline route, with the findings later published by Grogan and colleagues in 2007, and the Tullerboy excavation recorded in detail by Dennehy in 2004. What emerged was a ring-ditch, the kind of shallow circular earthwork, here with an internal diameter of roughly eight metres and a depth of just thirty centimetres, that archaeologists interpret as the foundation trace of a domestic dwelling. The ditch was not a single continuous channel but two curving sections separated by causeways to the northwest and southeast, together forming a slightly raised circular platform on which a house would presumably have stood. No post-holes or stake-holes survived within the ditch itself, and the pits found inside and around the enclosure yielded little useful information, their fills being largely sterile. More suggestive were nine substantial stake-holes recorded about three and a half metres to the northwest of the ring-ditch, though these formed no clear structural pattern, and the excavators noted that further remains may lie just beyond the northern limit of the pipeline wayleave, the legally defined strip of land within which construction and investigation were permitted. Two blue beads were recovered, one from the northern section of the ring-ditch and one from a small curvilinear ditch just to the south, quiet personal objects that survived long after everything else had dissolved into the grey-brown sandy clay.

The site itself sits on a plain with wide views across pastureland, roughly 670 metres northwest of Castle Ievers and close to the boundary with the townland of Rosstemple, with a ringfort visible about 280 metres to the southwest. Because the archaeological features were fully excavated during pipeline construction, there is nothing to see at ground level today. The value of the site lies entirely in the record rather than the remains, and access to the published excavation report, along with the site's entry in the National Monuments database, is the most direct way to engage with what was found here.