For years, the site was formally classified as a possible deserted settlement, raising the prospect of a medieval or early modern community that had quietly vanished. Excavation told a rather more mundane, though still instructive, story.

In 1995, trial excavations were carried out ahead of road improvement works along the N18/N19 corridor between Ballycasey and Dromoland. The digging, conducted under licence, established that the field banks belong to the 18th century, not to any earlier phase of occupation or abandonment. That finding quietly deflated the more dramatic interpretation: these earthworks are the remnants of agricultural enclosure, the kind of boundary-making that reorganised land across Ireland during the 1700s, rather than evidence of a community lost to famine, eviction, or plague. The reclassification matters because it illustrates how cautiously such sites need to be read. A pattern of banks and enclosures in a field can look, from the surface, like the ghost of something older and more significant than it actually is.