By the time the first Ordnance Survey maps were made in the nineteenth century it was still visible as a distinct earthwork; by the time later editions were produced, it had been levelled entirely, leaving nothing on the surface to suggest what lay beneath. It only came to light in 2005 when road works for the N6 Galway to Ballinasloe scheme required advance excavation, and what emerged was considerably more complex than anyone had anticipated.

Excavation between September 2005 and January 2006 revealed a multi-period site with at least three broad phases of activity, the earliest possibly prehistoric. The main phase, dated to the early medieval period, was defined by a substantial U-shaped fosse, a ditch about 1.5 metres deep, along with the remnants of an internal bank, the combined earthwork forming the kind of enclosed settlement known across early medieval Ireland. Within the eastern half of this enclosure lay the burial ground itself, containing 132 burials, almost all laid supine and oriented east to west in the Christian manner. A large assemblage of animal bone suggested the enclosure was also a working settlement over a long period. Four sub-phases of burial were identified. The earliest, dating to the seventh century, comprised 37 individuals, predominantly women and children, buried at the same time the enclosure was first constructed. The second phase, running from the mid-ninth to the eleventh century, was the most active, accounting for 75 individuals, of whom 93 per cent were non-adults. A third phase continued the pattern, with non-adults again making up the majority. The final phase, dated to the fifteenth century, yielded only two individuals, suggesting the site was gradually falling out of use.

The striking predominance of children and young people prompted questions about whether this was a cillín, a type of unconsecrated burial ground used specifically for unbaptised infants and other marginalised individuals, particularly common in the west of Ireland from the later medieval period onwards. The excavators concluded it was not. The spatial separation of non-adults appears instead to reflect an internal organisation within a normal mixed cemetery, a community burying its youngest members in a distinct area of consecrated ground rather than excluding them from it entirely. That distinction, quiet as it seems, carries considerable weight when it comes to understanding how early medieval communities in Connacht thought about death, belonging, and the organisation of their dead.