When excavation took place in September 2018 ahead of a development at Castleland, the ground revealed the outlines of a substantial rectangular enclosure attached to the inner edge of a much older ecclesiastical boundary. No pottery came out of it, no artefacts, no animal bones. Just silt, a little charcoal, and the faint signature of a hazel wood sample that would eventually speak across twelve centuries.

The enclosure in question sits on a gentle east-facing slope and measures roughly 50 metres by 33 to 40 metres internally, defined by ditches nearly three metres wide at the top and over two metres deep at their maximum. An ecclesiastical enclosure, in early medieval Irish contexts, typically refers to the ditched or banked boundary marking out the sacred ground of a monastery, separating the religious community from the secular world beyond. What makes this enclosure unusual is that it has no accompanying banks, only ditches, and it nestles against the inside of the boundary associated with the early monastery of St. Máedóg. A radiocarbon date from hazel charcoal in the basal silt returned a calibrated range of AD 685 to 873, placing it squarely in the same period as the ecclesiastical enclosure itself. Inside, a rectangular structure of around ten metres by six metres was identified through a scatter of pits, post-holes, and a hearth, though its south-western side had been damaged by later disturbance. A causeway entrance 2.6 metres wide opened to the south-east. At some point the ditches were cleaned out more than once, then finally backfilled in a single deliberate event, as though the enclosure was closed rather than simply abandoned. Whether it served a storage function, housed a workshop, or provided some other practical support to monastic life, the excavation could not say. The ground kept that particular secret.