When topsoil was stripped during construction of the Bord Gáis Éireann Pipeline to the West project, archaeologists monitoring the work began noticing something unexpected: fragments of both burnt and unburnt human and animal bone scattered across a surprisingly wide area. What had been an unremarkable stretch of ground, on the plateau of a low hill just reaching the hundred-foot contour, turned out to be a multiperiod site with several distinct phases of human activity, the oldest of which reached back to the very beginning of the Bronze Age.

Excavation in 2002, carried out by Angela Wallace on behalf of Margaret Gowen and Co. Ltd, revealed that the most ancient feature on the site was a crouched inhumation, the burial position in which the body is drawn up with knees towards the chest, as though sleeping. The burial had been badly disturbed, but associated with it were sherds of a decorated ceramic vessel. Specialist A.L. Brindley identified these as belonging to the Early Bronze Age vase tradition, dating the burial to somewhere between approximately 2100 and 1900 cal. BC, a period when such decorated pottery vessels were commonly placed with the dead. The site as exposed stretched roughly seventy metres east to west and covered the full width of the pipeline corridor, between fifteen and eighteen metres north to south, though the archaeologists noted that the site continued beyond those limits and was never fully excavated. Beneath a thin layer of peaty topsoil, the ground gave way to rocky subsoil and boulder clay, material deposited by the fluvio-glacial processes of the last Ice Age. Around a hundred and fifty metres to the north, a ringfort, the circular earthwork enclosure typical of early medieval Ireland, is clearly visible in the landscape, a reminder that this low hill was returned to repeatedly across the centuries by people who found it a useful or meaningful place to settle.