What they found instead were the foundations of a medieval building that had been quietly buried for centuries, its walls sliced through by an 18th-century millrace and forgotten long before anyone thought to look.

The excavation, carried out by archaeologist Martin Reid as part of the Kilkenny Main Drainage Scheme, uncovered the stone foundations of a rectangular structure measuring roughly 5.5 metres along its northwest to southeast axis and 2.5 metres across, with walls approximately 0.85 metres wide. Associated deposits yielded medieval pottery, confirming the building's age, though its precise function remains unknown. What complicates the picture further is the millrace, a channel cut to divert water from the River Breagagh to power a mill, whose 18th-century stone walls had cut directly through the earlier structure, truncating it and obscuring whatever else might have lain nearby. The building sat within what was once the precinct of the Franciscan friary, a religious house whose presence shaped this part of Kilkenny for several centuries. The friary itself is a known site, but the building uncovered here was a separate, unnamed structure within that same ecclesiastical landscape, its purpose swallowed by time and subsequent construction.