What they had stumbled upon was a site in use, in one form or another, across roughly four thousand years, its most poignant phase being what appears to have been a cillín, an informal burial ground used for infants and unbaptised children who, under Catholic practice, could not be interred in consecrated ground.

Excavation by Angela Wallace on behalf of Margaret Gowen and Co. Ltd uncovered 135 burials in total. Of these, roughly 52 were infants, 36 juveniles, and 44 adults, an unusually high proportion of young individuals that supports the identification of the site's later phase as a cillín. The story does not begin there, however. The earliest activity dates to between approximately 2100 and 1900 BC, represented by a crouched inhumation associated with sherds of a decorated Early Bronze Age vase, identified by A.L. Brindley as belonging to the vase tradition of that period. A large enclosing ditch some 48 metres in internal diameter ringed the hilltop, with an entranceway and post-holes on the eastern side. Within this enclosure, two small keyhole-shaped corn-drying kilns were later built; one of them, kiln F128, was eventually used as the site of an infant burial, the child placed in the kiln's flue. Among the finds associated with the kilns were a metal strap-end, an iron knife, and a possible candle- or rushlight-holder. A ringfort, one of the enclosed farmstead sites common across early medieval Ireland, is still visible roughly 150 metres to the north, hinting at a settled agricultural community making use of the same hill over centuries. The pattern of multiple functions, burial alongside grain-processing, finds close parallels at Kilpatrick in Co. Westmeath and at Killederdadrum in Co. Tipperary, where similar combinations of corn-drying kilns and cemetery use have been recorded.