Its skeleton was laid out and covered with stones, placed between two concentric ditches of an enclosure that, during the Early Medieval period, would have hummed with the work of people smelting iron, storing grain, and butchering animals. That combination, a formally interred dog alongside the industrial and domestic residue of everyday life, sits at the quieter end of the archaeological record, easily overlooked, but quietly telling.

Excavations carried out in 2006 revealed a double-ditched enclosure of considerable scale. The outer boundary measured roughly 90 metres by 70 metres and was almost square in plan, with rounded corners, a shape unusual enough to catch the eye of any archaeologist more accustomed to the circular raths and ringforts that dominate the Irish Early Medieval landscape. A rath, or ringfort, is a farmstead of the period typically enclosed by a single earthen bank and ditch. Here, though, there were two ditches, the inner one reaching nearly one and a half metres deep and between two and three metres wide. Large stones packed into the terminals of that inner ditch suggest the site once had a defined entrance, possibly a gate. The eastern portion of the outer ditch was filled with charcoal and burnt clay, hinting at burning episodes nearby. Inside the enclosure, curvilinear gullies yielded more charcoal, animal bone, and iron slag, the residue of metalworking. At least two kilns were identified in the interior, with a further late medieval kiln found close to the inner enclosure's entrance, suggesting the site saw activity across more than one period. Five iron knives and a number of other iron objects were recovered, placing the main phase of occupation firmly in the Early Medieval period. Between the two ditches, alongside the stone-covered dog, excavators also found a human burial.

Ballynakelly is not a site with a visitor centre or a marked trail. Its significance lives largely in the published record, specifically in the work of McCarthy (c. 2009), and in the national monuments database where the individual features carry their own reference numbers. For anyone researching Early Medieval settlement in County Dublin, or the archaeology of double-ditched enclosures more broadly, the site repays attention precisely because it does not conform to the expected template. The ditches, the kilns, the iron-working evidence, and the deliberate burial of a dog beneath a cairn of stones all suggest a place that was more than a simple farmstead, though exactly what it was remains, for now, an open question.