Beneath the surface of what looks like ordinary estate land lies the compressed archaeology of several centuries of human settlement, each layer cutting through or overwriting the one before it. What makes the site unusual is not just its age but its sequence: Gaelic medieval occupation, early plantation-era enclosure, a colonial administrative building, and then, abruptly, nothing. The whole area appears to have been abandoned around the middle of the 17th century and left largely undisturbed after that.

Excavations carried out in 2001 began with geophysical and topographic surveys that confirmed the earthworks in the area were not natural features. A magnetic survey located at least two house sites and a number of boundary features before any ground was opened. When excavation began, the layers came apart in reverse chronological order. At the deepest levels, the foundations of a 15th or 16th-century Gaelic domestic structure were found, with 16th-century cultivation ridges, the kind left by lazy-bed or ridge-and-furrow farming, cutting across them. Above these sat the gable-end foundations of a mid-17th-century house, and above that again a more substantial rectangular building, better constructed and interpreted as a timber-built English administrative structure. Immediately pre-dating this building was a palisade trench, dug in the late 16th or early 17th century, which is thought to have formed a stockade around an early plantation settlement. The plantation of Munster in this period involved the organised settlement of English colonists on land confiscated after the Desmond Rebellions, and the stockade fits the pattern of fortified administrative enclosures associated with that process. Cartographic and documentary evidence confirmed that after the mid-17th-century abandonment, no further building or landscaping disturbed the site, which is part of why the archaeology survived intact enough to read.