The site sits on a north-west-facing slope and is now absorbed into the grounds of the Aughinish Alumina industrial complex, which means the archaeology was rescued only by accident: excavations were carried out in 1974 ahead of industrial development, giving archaeologists a narrow window to examine something that might otherwise have been lost without record. What they found was quietly puzzling. The enclosure, roughly 56.5 metres north to south and 45 metres east to west, was bounded by a grass-covered stone bank of notably flimsy construction, built on little more than a thin skim of topsoil over limestone bedrock. A later dry-stone fence had cut across part of it, and the interior showed almost no layered deposit at all, just a shallow spread of topsoil sitting directly on rock or hard yellowish subsoil.

The excavator, Hickey, identified four distinct phases of activity at the site. Before the enclosure was built, there is evidence of iron smelting on the spot. The enclosure itself was then constructed, most probably as a sheep-fold, with the animal bones recovered from the interior and beneath the bank pointing strongly toward sheep. The date suggested for this phase of use falls between 1666 and around 1750. At some later point, a corner of the enclosure was pressed into service as a burial ground: eight graves were uncovered in the south-west quadrant, aligned east to west and set closely together. These contained the skeletal remains of twelve individuals, men and women, ranging in age from infancy to old age. No grave goods were found with any of them, and nothing datable was recovered from the burials themselves. Among the stray finds from the wider excavation was a ceramic shard identified as coming from Belgium or northern France, probably dating to the sixteenth or early seventeenth century. Eventually, the enclosure simply fell into disrepair. A comparable enclosure was excavated at the same time roughly 500 metres to the north.

Because the site lies within an active industrial complex, public access is not possible. The enclosure exists now primarily in the excavation record rather than on the ground, and any visitor interest is best pursued through the published report. What the site leaves behind is a particular kind of archaeological puzzle: a flimsy sheep pen that became, for reasons unrecorded, a small and densely packed cemetery, with no objects left to say who the people buried there were or why they came to rest in a corner of a farmyard on the edge of the Shannon.