Yet those modest remains, along with the fragments of pottery found pressed into the walls and floor, are enough to sketch the outline of a working rural settlement that was active around the turn of the fourteenth century and abandoned, its ditches deliberately backfilled, sometime before 1450.

The site came to light not through targeted investigation but as a byproduct of the Cork to Dublin gas pipeline, laid in 1981 and 1982. Excavations along the pipeline route exposed a strip of ground roughly ten to twelve metres north to south and twenty-five metres east to west, revealing two roughly parallel ditches oriented north-northwest to south-southeast. The wider of the two, on the western side, ran for at least eleven metres before continuing beyond the edge of the cutting; the narrower eastern ditch appeared to terminate within the excavated area. Clustered around these ditches were the remains of several structures: a corn-drying kiln, which would have been used to dry harvested grain before milling or storage, along with an associated yard and hearth; the scant stone foundations of what was interpreted as a house; and the northern end of a structure tentatively identified as a barn. The pottery associated with all of these features dates consistently to the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century. Taken together, the arrangement suggested to the excavating team, as reported by Hurley in 1987, that the wider ditch may have been the fosse, or defensive boundary ditch, of an enclosed manorial farmstead, a type of moated agricultural settlement known elsewhere in medieval Ireland and Britain. The settlement appears to have functioned for perhaps a century before falling out of use, its ditches filled in and the ground returned, eventually, to tillage.