When excavations were carried out in Glebe townland in 2006, adjacent to the Rathnew to Wicklow town road, archaeologists uncovered not only 191 burials but the foundations of a church that nobody had been able to find. Maps and documents had placed the site roughly 400 metres to the north-east. The discovery is believed to be the church of Drumkay, a name that had floated in the historical record without a confirmed location.

The burials span an extraordinary length of time, from around AD 600 through to at least AD 1600, apparently without a break. Of the 191 individuals excavated, 15 were infants, 48 were juveniles, and 120 were adults. The predominant rite was extended inhumation, laid out on the back with the head to the west, consistent with Christian practice, though some burials with flexed limbs and others with irregular orientations hint at people interred either before the church was built or after it had ceased to function. One lintel grave, a burial type in which the body is covered by flat stones, ran directly under the southern wall of the church, confirming it predates the structure. The church itself went through at least three phases: an original building measuring roughly 14.65 metres east to west, later shortened when its east wall was demolished and rebuilt 1.6 metres inward, and then extended again with a rubble-built annexe at the eastern end. Around all of this, a sequence of three concentric enclosure ditches defined the burial ground, each cutting through its predecessor as the cemetery expanded outward over the centuries. A single stone perforated pendant recovered from the fill of the second ditch is among the very few objects the site yielded. The overall enclosed area, as traced through the excavation trenches, measured approximately 33 metres north to south by 47 metres.