At Busherstown, on the Offaly and Tipperary North county border, excavations ahead of a road-building scheme revealed a place that was once wholly devoted to the processing of cereal crops, with kilns arranged across the landscape in a pattern that suggests something closer to an organised industrial operation than a modest farmstead facility. The kilns themselves were figure-of-eight or dumbbell-shaped in plan, each consisting of two connected chambers, one deeper firing chamber where heat was generated and a shallower drying chamber above, into which grain was placed to have its moisture driven off before storage or milling. All fifteen were earth-cut and unlined, with no stone lining to speak of, which places them in a tradition of relatively simple but effective cereal processing well attested in early medieval Ireland.

The site sits at around 140 metres above sea level, looking out over marshy ground to the north-east and east, with the ground falling sharply to the north towards a small, fast-flowing stream. That topography was almost certainly deliberate; elevated, well-drained ground above a water source is exactly what a working agricultural site would need. Excavation, carried out by Tori McMorran for Eachtra Archaeological Projects in 2007 as part of the N7 Castletown to Nenagh road scheme, showed that the kilns belonged to the earliest phase of activity on a multi-period site. A later phase saw the construction of deep, wide ditches that enclosed parts of the site, and these ditches were cut without much concern for the kilns already in the ground, truncating several of them. Whether the enclosure was built to define a still-active cereal-processing centre or was laid out after that activity had ceased is not entirely clear, though the spatial relationship between the ditch lines and the kiln positions suggests the two phases were not entirely unconnected. A final late phase added a massive ditch enclosing a subrectangular area, forming what is classified as a moated site, a type of enclosed settlement associated in Ireland primarily with the medieval period, in which a roughly rectangular platform was surrounded by a water-filled or wet ditch.