Before excavation began in 1981, there was nothing to see at ground level, no earthwork, no raised outline, nothing to suggest that a moated site, a type of medieval enclosed homestead typically surrounded by a water-filled ditch, lay just beneath the surface. It took infrastructure works associated with the Cork-Dublin gas pipeline to bring the site at Ballyveelish into focus.

Partial excavation carried out between 1981 and 1982, documented by Doody in 1987, uncovered four internal structures within the enclosure. Three buildings were identified in the eastern section, with a possible fourth to the west. One of these, known during the excavation as Structure C, was only partially uncovered. Situated about four metres south of an adjacent building, it retained traces of external stone walls and an internal wattle partition, wattle being a woven framework of thin branches used in construction, along with several postholes, a hearth, and a narrow entrance of roughly one metre in the north wall. The finds recovered from the site, including animal bones and artefacts consistent with a 13th or 14th century date, were notably sparse. That scarcity is itself informative: the excavators suggested it may point to a relatively brief period of occupation, a household or small community that settled, perhaps struggled, and moved on within a generation or two. The moated site at Ballyveelish leaves more questions than answers, which is perhaps fitting for a place that managed to disappear so thoroughly for so long.