Before groundworks could proceed, a geophysical survey was carried out under Licence no. 05R062, and the results were quietly telling: the survey flagged a series of rectilinear anomalies beneath the surface, the kind of regular, angular shapes that rarely occur by accident in the natural landscape and tend to point towards human construction.

Subsequent test excavation, conducted under Licence no. 05E1063 and reported by Lohan in 2006, confirmed that something genuinely structural lay underground. Archaeologists uncovered a rectilinear enclosure, a defined, roughly rectangular boundary feature of the sort commonly associated with early settlement, cut through by a drainage ditch. From the trenches came disarticulated animal bone and other domestic waste, the scattered, fragmentary residue of everyday life rather than ritual or industrial activity. The material strongly suggests that people once lived and ate here, disposing of the ordinary detritus of a household. What the excavation could not supply was a date. No datable artefacts were recovered, meaning the site cannot currently be placed within any particular period of Irish prehistory or history. It remains, for now, a settlement of unknown age.

Nevitt is a townland in north County Dublin, and the site itself is not marked or publicly presented in any formal way. There is no visitor access as such, and little to see at ground level; the enclosure and ditch lie beneath fields, their outlines invisible without the kind of specialist equipment used in the original survey. The interest here is less in what can be seen and more in what the process of discovery reveals: that routine planning investigations, often unglamorous and procedural, continue to turn up evidence of occupation in corners of the Irish landscape that might otherwise pass entirely unnoticed.