It came to attention not through deliberate archaeological inquiry but as a consequence of preparatory work for the proposed Metro North transport project, which prompted both a geophysical survey and a programme of test excavation in the late 2000s. What the investigations found was an enclosure measuring approximately 56 metres east to west and 45 metres north to south, defined by a ditch ranging from 1.9 to 3.5 metres in width on three sides, with the western side more elaborately protected by a branching double ditch. Inside the enclosure, traces of metalled surfaces, pits, and narrower subsidiary ditches survived, suggesting a site that had seen organised activity rather than casual or temporary use. Roughly 29.5 metres to the east, a shallow hollow way ran on a north-north-east to south-south-west alignment, about 4.2 metres wide and no more than half a metre deep at its greatest extent; a hollow way, essentially a worn trackway sunk below the surrounding ground level through repeated use, implying that the enclosure sat in a landscape that people moved through with some regularity.

Dating the site with precision has not been straightforward. The excavation recovered no medieval pottery of the kind typically associated with the later medieval period in Ireland, which is itself a form of evidence, suggesting the site was no longer in use by the time such wares became common. More positively, a fragment of concave furnace bottom iron slag was recovered from a lower fill of the enclosure ditch. Furnace bottom slag is a byproduct of iron smelting, formed when molten slag pools and cools at the base of a furnace, and its presence here points to some form of ironworking activity at or near the site. On the basis of these two strands of evidence, the enclosure has been tentatively assigned to the early medieval period, a broad span running roughly from the fifth to the twelfth century in an Irish context. The work was summarised by Frazer in 2009, with the overall findings compiled for the record by Christine Baker.

Because this site was identified through development-led survey rather than surface investigation, there is nothing to see at ground level. No earthwork, no visible ditch, no field monument marks its location for a passing visitor. Its significance lies entirely in what the subsurface evidence suggests about early medieval settlement and land use in north County Dublin, a region whose archaeological landscape has been substantially revealed, and in some cases lost, through infrastructural development over recent decades.