It was never excavated in the conventional sense; it was cleaned, measured, recorded, and then deliberately buried again, preserved in situ rather than removed.

The site came to light during groundworks for the N11 Ashford-Rathnew bypass, when a monitored topsoil-strip over a borrow pit, an area from which material is extracted for use in construction, exposed a series of features that appeared to represent a severely truncated prehistoric landscape. The most coherent of these was a subcircular foundation trench roughly 4.9 metres by 5 metres across, the kind of slot cut into the ground to hold the upright timbers or stone footings of a small roundhouse. Deep ploughing over many centuries had already done considerable damage, and the trench itself is thought to be quite shallow as a result. Around it, archaeologists found only faint and difficult-to-read traces: amorphous spreads of material and occasional patches of localised burning, the sort of residue that might suggest hearths or other domestic activity but cannot be confidently interpreted without clearer evidence. No diagnostic finds, the pottery sherds, flint tools, or metalwork that would allow a date to be assigned, were recovered from the site, leaving the question of when people actually lived here entirely open. It could be Bronze Age, it could be Iron Age; the record simply does not say.

The agreement reached between the developer and the National Monuments Service to preserve the remains rather than fully excavate them reflects a pragmatic approach sometimes taken when features are too fragile or too poorly preserved to reward costly investigation. The field has since been reinstated, and the house, whatever its age, remains undisturbed beneath it.