What followed was a rapid archaeological intervention, and it revealed not just a burial ground but a layered medieval landscape that nobody had anticipated finding beneath the topsoil.

Test trenches opened across the site uncovered five further skeletons, each laid out in the east-west orientation typical of Christian burial practice, heads to the west, bodies fully extended. Four of these were cut into a sterile yellow clay and had suffered badly because of it, leaving only faint traces of lower-body bone. A fifth, buried into a gravel layer laid over the clay, survived in excellent condition. Alongside the human remains, the trenches produced sherds of Leinster cooking ware, a type of medieval pottery produced in the Leinster region during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, as well as fragments of other medieval ceramics recovered near a small mortar-bonded stone feature. That feature, just under a metre in its longest exposed run, had a clean-dressed face on its eastern side and may represent the remains of a structure, though its full form was never determined. Further north, shallower stone settings with no mortar were also identified. The most striking single object was a partially damaged medieval relief tile found embedded in loam-filled cuts in the bedrock. Despite the damage, the decoration is legible: a horse with a rider, bridle, and reins; two birds; and what appears to be a deer with antlers. Traces of green glaze survive on its surface. Relief tiles of this kind were decorative floor tiles used in ecclesiastical and high-status secular buildings during the medieval period, which hints at the character of whatever once stood here.

The site was left unresolved after the 1990 trial trenching, with the options at that point being either full excavation or preservation in situ beneath open space within the development. Whether either course was ever pursued is not documented in what the investigation produced. The cuts in the bedrock, running downslope to the north, had not been fully exposed before the trenching was stopped, and their extent remains unknown.