What survives above ground is already striking: a church, a graveyard, and four high crosses, those tall, ring-headed stone monuments that marked the most important ecclesiastical centres of early medieval Ireland. Four of them in a single graveyard suggests this was no minor foundation.

The site sits on what was once an early medieval monastery, and the presence of those crosses points to a community that was both established and, at some point, abandoned. An archaeological excavation carried out within the graveyard in 1985 added considerably to this picture. The excavator, whose findings were published by Hurley in 1988, uncovered a wall with a possible bank beneath it, interpreted as the boundary of the original ecclesiastical enclosure, the defined precinct that would have set the monastery apart from the surrounding landscape. Inside this enclosure, the dig revealed a layer of organically enriched soil containing medieval pottery, which the excavator read as a possible occupation layer, physical evidence of people living and working within the enclosed space over an extended period. Alongside this were a slot trench and post holes, the kind of structural traces left by timber buildings long since vanished.

Taken together, the evidence suggests a settlement that developed in the shadow of the monastery, grew alongside it through the medieval period, and eventually ceased. The pottery and soil chemistry speak to habitation; the post holes and trenches speak to construction and maintenance; and the high crosses speak to a community that once considered this hillside, looking out over the Suir, a place worth marking permanently in stone.