What made it particularly interesting was not any single dramatic find, but the layered relationship between different phases of enclosure, each cutting into or overriding the one before it.

The excavation, carried out under licence number 04E1604, revealed that the earliest significant feature was a rectangular enclosure dating to the early medieval period, measuring 16.6 metres by 11 metres. An enclosure of this type, essentially a defined area marked out by a ditch and possibly a bank or fence, was a common way of organising space in early medieval Ireland, whether for a farmstead, a small ecclesiastical site, or some other bounded use. A radiocarbon date obtained from the upper fill of the enclosure ditch placed activity there between 898 and 966 AD, a period that falls within the later phases of the early medieval era. At some point after the rectangular enclosure fell out of use, circular enclosures were cut into the site from the north and east, truncating the earlier feature. These later intrusions, recorded as DU012-094003, are what archaeologists mean when they describe a site as multi-period: the ground holds not one moment but several, each partially erasing the last. The findings were published by Halliday in 2008.

The site at Drinan is not publicly accessible as a monument in the conventional sense, having been excavated ahead of development rather than preserved in situ. There is nothing to stand before on the ground today. Its interest lies entirely in the record: for anyone tracing early medieval settlement patterns in the greater Dublin area, or following up on the archaeology of development-led excavations, the published findings and the licence documentation held with the National Monuments Service are the primary routes in. The parish of Drinan sits in the Swords area of Fingal, and the surrounding landscape has yielded other traces of early activity, making this one small piece of a denser picture of how people organised and reorganised the land over generations.