It is the sort of site that only becomes visible when development forces the ground open, and it is precisely that disruption, an excavation carried out under licence in advance of construction, that brought this place into the historical record at all.

The excavation, conducted under licence number 04E1604, revealed a multi-period site of some complexity. The enclosure itself measured roughly 10.5 metres across and was positioned to the south-west of a larger outer enclosure, though the evidence suggested it functioned at the same time as an inner enclosure nearby, making it part of a layered, organised landscape rather than a standalone feature. In the internal north-west corner, excavators found a concentration of pits and postholes, the kinds of features that suggest small structures or working areas once stood there. A copper alloy fastener or brooch recovered from the ditch fill offers a rare personal note among the largely functional debris. More telling, perhaps, was the presence of numerous cattle heads, which archaeologists interpreted as evidence of butchery and possibly craft-working, activities like the processing of hides or bone that would have taken place at the margins of a settlement rather than at its centre. A radiocarbon date obtained from the ditch fill places this activity firmly in the twelfth century, between 1109 and 1173 AD, a period when Dublin's hinterland was being drawn increasingly into the economic orbit of the growing town.

There is nothing to see at the surface today. The site was excavated in advance of development, which means the landscape above it has almost certainly been altered. Its value lies entirely in what the excavation recorded, details published by Halliday in 2008, and in what those details suggest about how ordinary agricultural and craft activity was organised in medieval north Dublin. For anyone tracing the archaeology of the county, the site reference numbers, DU012-094003 for the outer enclosure and DU012-0003 for the inner, offer a route into the wider record. The real interest here is less in visiting a place than in understanding that this quiet corner of Dublin once smelled of cattle, smoke, and whatever small metalwork or leather goods were being made in a draughty corner of a twelfth-century enclosure.