The hut site at Ballyhomulta, in County Clare, was absent from both the Sites and Monuments Record of 1992 and the Record of Monuments and Places of 1996, the two principal inventories that were meant to capture exactly this kind of early remains. It sat, unregistered, within the enclosure of a cashel, and waited.

A cashel is a type of early medieval stone-walled enclosure, typically circular, used to protect a farmstead or the residence of a local lord. This one at Ballyhomulta contains, at its centre, a subcircular hut site with an estimated diameter of around 7.5 metres. The hut itself is now little more than a grass-covered collapsed wall or bank, the stones having long since slumped and blended into the surrounding vegetation. The combination of the two structures, an enclosure sheltering a domestic interior, follows a pattern common across early medieval Ireland, though sites this small and this unassuming rarely attract attention. It is precisely the kind of place that gets overlooked in landscape surveys, which perhaps explains why it slipped through the recording net for the better part of a decade.