A flat cemetery, as the type is known, lacks the above-ground monuments that make prehistoric burial sites immediately legible in the landscape; no mound, no standing stones, no obvious markers. What lies beneath is detected only when something else disturbs the soil, and in this case that something else was a major road.

The site at Danesfort came to light in 2007 during excavation carried out ahead of the N9/N10 Kilcullen to Waterford road improvement scheme. What archaeologists found was a cluster of related features spread across the valley floor. The earliest and most puzzling element was a possible pit-circle: a small central pit, only about 36 by 44 centimetres across, ringed by six larger pits spaced roughly 1.7 to 1.9 metres apart, the whole arrangement enclosed within a ring-ditch ten metres in diameter. A ring-ditch is essentially a circular trench, often the eroded remnant of a burial mound's enclosing bank and ditch, or sometimes a freestanding ceremonial enclosure. None of the six surrounding pits showed clear evidence of having held upright posts, so what they were originally for remains uncertain. The central pit, however, yielded Early Bronze Age pottery, placing activity here somewhere in the broad span of roughly 2500 to 1500 BC. About thirty metres to the north-east sat two further ring-ditches. The larger, 8.3 metres in diameter and cut directly into limestone bedrock, contained a cremation pit and a hearth, along with silty fills and faint traces of charcoal. The smaller, a V-shaped ditch five metres across, had no internal features at all. Between the pit-circle complex and these two ring-ditches, excavators also identified possible evidence of metalworking, a detail that hints at a site used for more than burial alone, perhaps during a period when bronze technology was still relatively new to Ireland.