Before the Limerick Southern Ring Road could be laid down, archaeologists moved in ahead of the diggers and found something the maps had never recorded: a cluster of medieval structures sitting quietly on a low ridge above the marshy ground bordering the Groody River, roughly 50 metres to the south.

The centrepiece of the find was a circular hut site, 7.7 metres in diameter, its outline preserved as a shallow slot trench, essentially a narrow channel cut into the ground to hold the base of a wall, which ran around the perimeter of the building's floor. A gap on the east side of that trench marked where the entrance had been. On its own, the structure would have been interesting enough, but its context made it more so. Ten metres to the west sat a contemporary earthen ringwork castle, a type of fortification built by throwing up a circular earthen bank and ditch rather than using stone, common in Ireland from the Norman period onward. Five metres to the east was a corn-drying kiln, a low stone structure used to dry harvested grain before milling, a standard fixture of medieval agricultural settlements. All three features date to roughly AD 1200 to 1400, and the hut site's shape so closely resembles structures found inside the ringwork castle that the excavator eventually reinterpreted it not as a dwelling but as a barn serving the wider settlement. The sites were recorded and published through work by Collins and Cummins in 2001 and Bermingham and colleagues in 2013.

The site itself lies in an area that has been substantially altered by road infrastructure and is not accessible to casual visitors in the way that a field monument in open countryside might be. The structures were excavated and recorded in advance of development rather than preserved in situ, which is common practice when archaeology is uncovered during construction surveys. What remains is the published record and the knowledge that a functioning medieval farmstead, with its castle, barn, and kiln all within a few metres of one another, once occupied this ridge above the boggy river ground, going entirely unnoticed until the route of a ring road happened to pass straight through it.