When excavation eventually came, it revealed not a single dramatic monument but a dense accumulation of everyday evidence, the kind that tends to get overlooked in favour of tombs and towers.

Archaeologist Audrey Gahan excavated an area of roughly 80 metres by 40 metres at Ballynabarny, uncovering a concentration of features that together suggest sustained domestic activity during the Bronze Age, a period running broadly from around 2500 to 500 BC in Ireland. Among the finds were numerous pits, post-holes, and stake-holes, the last two being the tell-tale underground signatures of timber structures whose above-ground fabric has long since rotted away. A circular house structure with a diameter of around 10 metres was identified, along with an open-ended rectangular structure and several ring-ditches, which are shallow circular channels that may have surrounded small burial mounds or defined other ritual or domestic spaces. Large quantities of Bronze Age pottery were also recovered across the site. The excavation was recorded under licence reference 02E0547 and published in Bennett's 2004 compilation of Irish excavation reports.