The hedgerows are gone, the ground has been smoothed out, and nothing now announces that anything is there at all. That quiet erasure makes it all the more striking that the place persisted in local memory for long enough to be recorded, and eventually excavated.

When archaeologists broke ground here in 1979, they found the faint outline of an oval enclosure measuring roughly 52 metres north to south and 70 metres east to west, a form typical of early Irish ecclesiastical sites, where a raised bank and ditch defined a sacred interior from the surrounding landscape. The south-eastern entrance had survived well enough to reveal an unexcavated causeway and post-holes indicating a gate. Inside, the foundation trenches of a circular house were uncovered at the western end, and two further house sites were found on the north side, one built directly over the other. A small annexe outside the western edge of the enclosure contained cultivation furrows, its ditches stopping just short of the main enclosure ditch. Among the finds was a sherd of E-ware, a type of imported continental pottery associated with high-status Early Christian sites in Ireland and western Britain, placing activity here somewhere in the period broadly spanning the sixth to eighth centuries. The parish, recorded as "Kildadrum", appears in the Papal Taxation of 1302 to 1306, where it was assessed at twenty shillings, suggesting it retained some ecclesiastical standing into the medieval period. Later burials were found cutting across the earlier occupation layers, some datable to post-medieval times, and a small standing stone near the centre of the site may have served as a general marker for burial in this later phase. That stone has been tentatively linked to the practice of burying unbaptised children, infants who under older Catholic custom could not be interred in consecrated ground and were instead laid in marginal or ambiguous spaces at the edges of recognised cemeteries.