No earthwork survived above ground, no local tradition pointed to anything buried beneath the grass. The site at Sallymount existed in complete anonymity until a road-building project brought archaeologists and their test trenches to the area, and what they found turned out to be not one settlement but several, layered across roughly two thousand years of continuous human activity on the same modest patch of ground.

The site came to light in 2006, when a team from Aegis Archaeology carried out test trenching ahead of the construction of the Southern Limerick Ring-Road, working under Ministerial Direction Number A026. Full excavation followed in 2007, led by archaeologist Patricia Long, and the results were published in 2009. The earliest evidence was Bronze Age, centred roughly in the middle of the site: two pits, one of which still held a Late Bronze Age domestic vessel, along with scattered postholes. By the Iron Age, the focus had shifted to the north-east, where a subcircular enclosure, essentially a roughly circular ditched boundary, had been constructed using three segmented ditches broken by two causeways or entrance gaps. To the south and south-west of this enclosure, excavators found a nine-post structure linked to cereal processing and a linear ditch containing deliberate deposits of metalworking waste, the kind of careful, repeated dumping that suggests organised craft activity rather than casual disposal. Later, in the early medieval period, the interior of that Iron Age enclosure was reused for domestic purposes: a hearth, a four-post structure, and numerous pits and stakeholes appeared within it. A smithing hearth associated with further metalworking was found in a rectangular structure to the south, and two corn-drying kilns of a distinctive dumb-bell shape were identified nearby. Corn-drying kilns were used to dry harvested grain before milling or storage, and their presence alongside metalworking evidence points to a settlement that was economically varied rather than simply subsistence-level. Among the finds recovered were prehistoric pottery, two worked flints, two well-made whetstones, corroded metal objects, and a substantial quantity of ferrous slag and furnace lining fragments.

The site itself is no longer accessible as an archaeological feature; excavation preceded road construction, and the Southern Limerick Ring-Road now runs through the area. What survives is the published record, Patricia Long's 2009 report, which remains the primary source for anyone wanting to understand the sequence of activity here. For those interested in the broader landscape, the ring-road corridor in this part of County Limerick passed through terrain that proved archaeologically dense, and Sallymount 1 was one of several sites uncovered during the same programme of works.