At Derryville Bog in County Tipperary, a low ridge of ground that had quietly held its secrets for millennia only gave them up when topsoil removal brought archaeological monitors onto the scene. What they found was not a single isolated structure but the footprint of a small Bronze Age settlement, a cluster of round houses arranged side by side, their walls and doorways legible in the ground long after every timber and thatch had rotted away.

Excavation, carried out by Ó Néill in 1998, revealed three round houses designated A, B, and C, which appear to have been broadly contemporary, along with traces of at least two further structures whose nature remained harder to pin down. House A, the largest at roughly nine metres in diameter, was defined by a circular wall-slot, a trench that would once have held the foundation timbers or wattle panels of the walls, with a doorway facing south-east and a ring of six post-holes inside indicating where the roof was supported. House B sat immediately to the north, slightly smaller at around eight metres across, built on the same principle. House C lay to the north-east but was only partially recoverable, its western arc surviving while a modern field boundary and tree-line had disturbed the rest. A fourth structure to the south, designated D, consisted of an interrupted gully with what may have been a doorway, though its function could not be firmly established. A fifth and possibly earlier structure, E, was identifiable only as a pattern of post-holes partly cut through by the walls of A and B, suggesting the ridge had seen occupation before even the main settlement phase. The finds recovered from the site fit comfortably into a Bronze Age context: coarse pottery, a saddle quern used for grinding grain, hammerstones, rubbing stones, a probable whetstone, burnt daub from wall or hearth material, and small quantities of struck chert and flint.