In 2002, archaeologists monitoring topsoil removal for the Bord Gáis Éireann Pipeline to the West project, roughly 11km east-north-east of Moate, noticed fragments of burnt and unburnt human and animal bone spreading across a wide area of a low plateau. What followed was a partial excavation that revealed not one site but several centuries of overlapping use, compressed into a modest hilltop in the undulating midlands landscape, with a ringfort still plainly visible 150 metres to the north.

The excavation, carried out by Angela Wallace on behalf of Margaret Gowen & Co. Ltd, uncovered a sequence stretching back to the Early Bronze Age. The earliest feature was a crouched inhumation, a burial position in which the body is drawn up rather than laid flat, associated with sherds of a decorated vase identified by A.L. Brindley as belonging to the Early Bronze Age vase tradition, dating to somewhere between around 2100 and 1900 BC. Encircling the plateau was a ditch with an internal diameter of roughly 48 metres, with an entranceway on the eastern side marked by three post-holes. Inside this enclosure, excavators found two keyhole-shaped corn-drying kilns, several pits of uncertain function, and a bullaun stone, a boulder with a shallow circular depression ground into its upper surface, typically associated with early ecclesiastical sites. In total, 135 burials were recovered, an unusually high proportion of whom were children: approximately 52 infants, 36 juveniles, and 44 adults. A concentration of badly degraded infant and juvenile remains in the centre of the site may represent a cillín, the Irish term for an informal burial ground used for unbaptised children and others excluded from consecrated ground. Among the more unsettling finds were burial no. 5, an adult whose skull fragment was found beside the upper femur rather than attached to the skeleton, suggesting possible decapitation, and burial no. 133, the only prone burial on the site, laid face-down in a manner associated elsewhere with those deemed unworthy of ordinary Christian interment, perhaps a criminal or a suicide. A juvenile burial, no. 59, contained only a skull and a possible arm bone, with a rock protruding naturally from the boulder clay directly beneath the chin.

The site resists easy classification. Its closest parallels are other Early Christian and medieval cemetery enclosures, including Kilpatrick in Co. Westmeath and Killederdadrum in Co. Tipperary, both of which combined corn-drying kilns and burial in similar configurations. The enclosing ditch, the kilns, the bullaun stone, and the generations of dead suggest a place that served a community in multiple ways across a very long period, and one that the pipeline corridor only partially interrupted.