Local people had always called it "The Kyle Field" or "Kylederrydadrum", and their memory of the place outlasted every official record of it. By the time archaeologists arrived in 1979, all the field boundaries had been removed and the land reclaimed, yet the name and its association with the dead had persisted quietly in the surrounding community for generations.

When excavations were carried out that year, what emerged was not simply a burial ground but a layered early Christian settlement, the kind of oval enclosure, defined by a ditch and measuring roughly 52 metres north to south and 70 metres east to west, that characterised small ecclesiastical or domestic sites of the period. The south-east entrance had a causeway and post-holes for a gate. Inside the enclosure, archaeologists uncovered the foundation trenches of circular houses, including two on the north side that had been built in sequence, one partly overlying the other. A small annex feature lay just outside the enclosure to the west, its ditches deliberately stopping short of the main boundary ditch, with traces of cultivation furrows within it. Among the finds was a fragment of E-ware, a type of imported pottery from western Gaul that appears at Irish sites from roughly the sixth and seventh centuries and serves as a reliable indicator of Early Christian-period occupation. The parish itself, recorded as "Kildadrum", appears in the Papal Taxation of 1302 to 1306, where it was valued at twenty shillings, suggesting it held some recognised ecclesiastical standing in the medieval period. The burials uncovered during excavation are harder to date: some were clearly post-medieval, and the rest could not be demonstrated to be any earlier. A small standing stone near the centre of the site may have functioned as a general marker for the burial area during a later phase of use, and it has been associated with the interment of unbaptised children, a practice common in Irish burial grounds known as cilliní, where infants excluded from consecrated ground were laid quietly at the margins of older, remembered sacred spaces.