The site came to light not through antiquarian curiosity but through road-building; excavations carried out in 2006 and 2007 ahead of improvements to the N9/N10 Kilcullen to Waterford route uncovered a cluster of monuments packed into roughly 1.8 hectares, with activity spanning from the Late Neolithic through to the early medieval period.

At the core of the site is a subcircular palisaded enclosure, a boundary originally formed by upright timber posts set into a foundation slot cut into the ground, about 41.5 metres across. A fragment of one of those posts survived well enough to be radiocarbon dated, giving a calibrated range of 71 to 215 AD, placing the enclosure firmly in the early centuries after the turn of the first millennium. Inside and around it, the picture that emerged was of a working settlement rather than anything ceremonial or elite. Four circular post-built structures clustered to the north-east, while the interior contained a rectangular structure, domestic pits, kilns for processing grain or other materials, and metalworking furnaces. That combination of craft production and domestic life within a defined boundary is a recognisable pattern in Irish settlement archaeology of the period. More unexpected was the flat cemetery found both inside and just outside the western edge of the enclosure; a flat cemetery, as opposed to a burial mound, leaves no visible surface trace and is often only discovered when the ground is broken for another purpose. This one appears to predate the enclosure itself, suggesting the site had already accumulated significance before the palisade was ever driven into the earth. In time, the enclosure was cut into by a later field system to the east and by a ringfort, the familiar circular earthwork farmstead of the early medieval Irish countryside, to the north-west, each new use quietly erasing a little more of what came before.