But its distinctly rounded, quadrantal form is a tell-tale sign that something much older underlies it, an Early Christian ecclesiastical enclosure whose true scale was invisible at ground level until aerial photographs revealed a ghostly cropmark tracing a great oval in the fields around the isolated churchyard.

Archaeologist D. L. Swan began excavating the site in 1973, having first spotted it during an aerial survey of enclosed ecclesiastical sites across the Meath-Westmeath area. What he found beneath the surface was a substantial fosse, the term for a wide defensive or boundary ditch, cut directly into bedrock to a depth of around three metres, between five and six metres wide at the top, U-shaped in profile, and originally fronted by an internal bank faced with large stones. The enclosure defined an oval area roughly 100 metres across on its north-south axis. Excavations continued until 1980, gradually recovering the complete circuit of the enclosure through a series of targeted cuttings guided by aerial photography. The finds told a layered story: brooch pins and ring pins, small iron knives, worked bone and antler, sherds of coarse ware and imported French pottery, and a fragment of E ware, a type of fine pottery traded from western Gaul and associated with high-status early medieval sites in Ireland and Britain. Among the more striking objects was a tinned copper-alloy mount, just five centimetres long and richly decorated with an incised design of opposed peltae, trumpet curves, and scrolls, in fine condition despite its age. A keyhole-shaped corn-drying kiln contained substantial grain deposits, and postholes up to sixty centimetres in diameter suggested the former presence of a large circular structure. Perhaps most sobering was what emerged within the churchyard itself: in a cutting barely two and a half by five metres, the remains of over forty individuals, thirty-two of them infants or young children, buried in a dense concentration less than forty centimetres below the surface. A tiny copper-alloy bird on a ribbed tang was recovered nearby, its closest parallel coming from excavations at Whitby in Yorkshire. Concealed somewhere in the western sector was a large iron key, thought to belong to the fifteenth- or sixteenth-century church whose ruins still stand within the graveyard.