The site, known historically as Graves Moate at Mount Offaly near Cabinteely, had been flagged in the National Museum's Topographical Files after earlier discoveries of skeletal material and a stone-lined grave. It took a planning application for an Esso service station to bring the full scale of the place to light.

Excavations carried out in 1998, ahead of the construction work, uncovered at least 1,553 individual burials, along with disarticulated remains and two charnel pits, which are communal burial deposits containing mixed skeletal material rather than intact individual graves. The burial sequence appears to have begun around the 5th or 6th century and continued until approximately the 11th or 12th century, making it an Early Christian and early medieval site of considerable depth and complexity. Most of the dead were laid out in the extended position with their heads to the west, the conventional Christian orientation, though a number were positioned with the head to the north or east. Two female burials contained full-term foetuses, one in the breech position. The finds retrieved from the site were remarkable in their range: iron shroud-pins, knives, shears, D-shaped belt-buckles, blue glass and bone beads, and a double-sided bone comb with decorated dot-and-circle panels still held in place by four iron rivets. More striking still was the imported pottery, including fragments of Phocaean red slipware, a fine ware originating from the town of Phocaea on the Aegean coast of what is now Turkey, along with amphora sherds and E-ware, all datable to the 6th or 7th century. Such imports point to a site of significant status, connected to wider Mediterranean trade networks at a time when much of western Europe had lost those links. Objects interpreted as mounts for shrines or reliquaries, combined with evidence of hearths, a furnace, a used millstone, and large quantities of butchered animal bone, suggest the enclosure served both religious and secular purposes.

The site is not accessible or marked in any conventional sense; it lies beneath a commercial development near Loughlinstown, and nothing visible remains above ground. Its interest lies entirely in the archaeological record, held in excavation reports and museum collections. For anyone researching early medieval Dublin or the archaeology of Early Christian enclosures, the published excavation by Conway (1999) and the subsequent discussion in Cahill and Sikora (2011) are the practical points of entry. The pre-development assessment carried out in 1995 had suggested at least fourteen burials; the eventual total was over a hundred times that figure.