It is the kind of place that exists only briefly in the archaeological record, appearing just long enough to be noted, then sealed permanently under tarmac and hard-core.

In 2002, ahead of the carriageway's construction, excavators uncovered the remains of the site under licence, catalogued in the published record by Kieran in 2007. Hut sites of this kind are typically the traces of simple domestic structures, sometimes circular, sometimes rectilinear, defined by post-holes, stone footings, or the ghost of a hearth. They can date to almost any period, from the Bronze Age through to the early medieval, and are often the most ordinary evidence of the most ordinary lives, people who built shelter, lit fires, and left little else behind. Without further published detail on what exactly was found here, the site's precise date and character remain unclear, but its location in County Wicklow places it within a landscape that has yielded considerable prehistoric and early medieval activity over the years.

There is nothing to see at Milltown today. The excavation was a salvage operation, undertaken precisely because the site was about to be destroyed, and the dual carriageway has since erased any surface trace. What survives is the record itself, a small entry in the published literature, which is sometimes all that remains of a place where someone once lived.