By 2011, it was gone, ploughed flat and reclaimed into the surrounding fields. What had survived, possibly for centuries, was erased within a few years of being formally identified.

The site came to light not through any planned investigation but as a side effect of infrastructure. During the construction of the Cork-to-Dublin gas pipeline in 1983, fieldworkers recorded what they described as a deserted village of possible medieval date, well preserved and visible on the surface. Excavation trenches were opened at the time, but they yielded no archaeological material, leaving the date of the settlement entirely unknown. The structures, a mix of rectangular and circular buildings joined by trackways, suggest a community that lived and organised itself here over some sustained period, though who they were and exactly when remains unresolved. The terrain is gently undulating and low-lying, the kind of landscape that absorbs and conceals as readily as it preserves.

What makes the story particularly pointed is the timeline. Satellite imagery from November 2005 still showed the earthworks clearly, with tillage fields pressing in from the west and north. By April 2011, those fields had expanded across the site and the earthworks had been levelled. A place that persisted long enough to be spotted during a pipeline survey, documented, partially dug, and then photographed from orbit, was ultimately lost not to time but to ordinary agricultural activity in the space of a few years.