A fosse, the term for a defensive ditch, traced a ring roughly fifteen metres across, and a smaller solid circle of about seven metres sat slightly off-centre within it. On the ground, there was nothing to see at all.

When excavation eventually took place under licence in 2004, the site proved to hold not one period of activity but two, layered across nearly a millennium. Beneath the surface was a penannular enclosure dating to the 5th or 6th century. Penannular means almost circular, a ring broken by a deliberate gap, a form associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, typically surrounding a dwelling or small farmstead. This earlier enclosure measured roughly 26 metres in diameter. Cutting across it, and partially obliterating it, was a larger enclosure from the 13th or 14th century, approximately 42 metres in diameter, with an entrance facing south-east. The later feature did not replace the earlier one with any apparent awareness of what it was superseding; it simply imposed itself on the same ground, as later periods so often did, indifferent to what came before. The excavation results were published by Molloy in 2007 and again in 2009, bringing a site that had existed as an aerial photograph anomaly into the documented archaeological record.