The precise location of that church, however, was a genuine puzzle. Every edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map marked the site incorrectly, and when test excavations were carried out in 2006 ahead of a proposed housing development, archaeologists found ditches, an 18th-century brick-manufacturing deposit, a possible corn-drying kiln, and the foundations of a rectangular building with a hearth, but nothing that looked like a church. What the first-edition OS had recorded as the church of Drumkay appeared, on closer inspection, to be a domestic structure that had already fallen into ruin before the surveyors arrived in 1837, and which they had misidentified from its foundations alone.

The actual church turned up about 400 metres to the south-west, beneath Knockrobbin Hill adjacent to the Rathnew to Wicklow town road, discovered during a separate excavation also carried out in 2006. What emerged was considerably more substantial than anyone had anticipated. The foundations of a stone church were uncovered, built in at least three phases. The earliest structure measured 14.65 metres east to west by 7.3 metres externally, its walls constructed from roughly hewn limestone in random coursing. At some later point the east wall was demolished and a new one raised 1.6 metres further west, shortening the building; this replacement wall was built without mortar, using clay as bonding, with four large granite boulders forming its core alongside a mix of limestone and shale. A third phase added a walled annexe to the eastern end. Surrounding the whole complex were three successive enclosure ditches, the innermost of which ran for at least 26.5 metres along the brow of the hill. Most striking of all was the cemetery. A total of 191 burials were uncovered, enclosed within the ditch sequence, with the earliest radiocarbon-dated to around ad 600 and the sequence continuing apparently without interruption to at least ad 1600, representing the better part of a thousand years of continuous use on a single hillside site.