What emerged was a layered record of early medieval industry, burial, and farming, compressed into a small area of ground at Tonybaun, with a clay crucible fragment, the kind of small fired-clay vessel used to melt and pour metal, built directly into one of the stone grave settings of the burial ground. It is an oddly intimate detail: a piece of industrial equipment repurposed, centuries later, as part of someone's grave.

The excavation, carried out in advance of the road works, revealed that the burial ground itself was established in the late fifteenth century and later served as a cillin, a children's burial ground of the kind used in Ireland from the medieval period into the modern era for unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground. Forty metres to the north, an Iron Age metalworking site was identified. More striking, however, was what lay beneath the burial ground itself. A charcoal-flecked sandy layer containing vitrified sand and iron slag, the glassy residue left when sand fuses under intense heat during metalworking, was found in situ and radiocarbon-dated to between AD 882 and 1015. Beneath that was a further charcoal-rich deposit dating to AD 772 to 969. Stray pieces of iron slag were scattered among the later burials as well, suggesting that traces of the earlier industrial activity persisted visibly in the soil long after the metalworking had ceased. Cultivation ridges found immediately adjacent to the burial ground also returned early medieval dates, adding an agricultural dimension to what was clearly a busy, if difficult to fully characterise, settlement landscape.

What the excavation cannot tell us is precisely what form that settlement took. No structures were identified, and the evidence amounts to residues and horizons rather than buildings or boundaries. But the sequence of activity, from early medieval ironworking and cultivation through to a late medieval burial ground still in use within living memory, is a reminder of how much can accumulate, invisibly, beneath an ordinary field beside an ordinary road.