What emerged, over two seasons of excavation in 2006 and 2007, was a compact but remarkably complete picture of medieval agricultural life, preserved beneath a gently sloping field on the east side of a quietly unremarkable piece of Irish midland countryside. Five corn-drying kilns, a threshing floor, a well, a water-hole, a road running east to west, and the fragmentary corner of a house: the kind of working farmstead that once would have been utterly ordinary, and is now almost nowhere visible above ground.

The site sits within what was historically the manor of Martry, in the barony of Lower Navan. The barony itself was granted by Hugh de Lacy to Jocelin de Angulo at the start of the Anglo-Norman settlement of Meath in 1172, though the precise early history of this particular corner of it is unrecorded. The place appears in the documents only in 1324, when an inquisition into the value of the manor of Martry, which had reverted to the Crown after its holder Walter de Say was implicated in a felony during the Bruce campaign of 1314 to 1318, names Fenokston for the first time. Among the free tenants listed are David Beg, Adam Beg, and Richard Lewati, who together held a carucate of land, roughly three hundred acres, at Fenokston. These families were most probably the people behind the agricultural enterprise that the excavation revealed. The ceramics recovered from the kilns, pits, and furrows date broadly from the late twelfth to the fourteenth century, fitting neatly with the documentary picture. The name itself has nothing to do with the bird associated with fire and resurrection: Phoenixtown is an anglicisation of the Irish Baile na bhfionnóg, meaning the town of the grey crow, which passed through the intermediate form Finnogestown before settling into its present, misleading shape.

The only building identified in the complex was traced through a foundation trench, a narrow cut roughly seven metres long with a short spur extending westward, located just south of the well. A fragment of roofing slate lent support to the interpretation. Around ten metres to the west, a cluster of small pits containing burnt animal bone and pottery may represent domestic debris from the same household. The furrows that cut across the entire site, aligned north to south and east to west, appear to represent the final phase of activity, after whatever settlement existed here had been abandoned. The corn-drying kilns, structures used to dry harvested grain before milling or storage, a common feature of Irish medieval sites, were the most numerous and probably the most economically significant element of the complex, suggesting the place functioned at least in part as a processing centre serving the wider manor.