These enclosures, often modest in scale, defined a domestic space, separating the habitation area from the surrounding landscape in a gesture that was as much symbolic as practical.

The site was excavated ahead of road construction, a circumstance that has produced a surprising proportion of Ireland's archaeological discoveries over the past few decades, when infrastructure projects trigger legally required investigations before ground is disturbed. At Milltown, the excavation, carried out under licence in 2002, revealed the crescent-shaped ditch as the defining feature of what had been classified as a hut site. The findspot sits somewhere beneath or beside what is now a dual carriageway, the physical trace of the enclosure itself long since removed by the development it was excavated to precede.