But beneath those later features, road construction works in 2002 and 2003 opened a window into something considerably older: a place where people had been living, eating, and perhaps performing rituals more than five thousand years ago.

The excavation, carried out on the northern half of the rath in advance of road works, uncovered an occupation layer cut through by a series of cylindrical pits. A rath, for context, is a roughly circular earthwork enclosure typical of early medieval Ireland, but here the ground beneath it told a different story entirely. One of the pits contained sherds from a single ceramic vessel, broken before being placed in the ground, with only around a third of the pot present. Radiocarbon dating of these sherds returned a date range of 3510 to 3350 cal. BC, placing them firmly in the early Neolithic period. The sherds were in fresh condition, meaning they had not been worn or weathered before deposition, which lent weight to the interpretation that the broken pot was a deliberate offering rather than ordinary domestic waste. The remaining pits yielded animal bones, fragments of hazelnut shell, and indeterminate cereal grain, the quiet residue of daily life. The excavation also identified traces of an earlier enclosure predating the rath, one that may well have bounded this whole area of prehistoric activity, though the limited extent of the dig prevented a firm conclusion on that point.

What makes the site quietly arresting is the layering. The same modest rise in the landscape attracted Neolithic settlers leaving offerings in pits, then later communities building an earthwork enclosure, and eventually the construction of both a rath and a children's burial ground, known in Irish tradition as a cillín, a place set aside for the interment of unbaptised infants. Each phase folded over the last, with only careful excavation pulling any of it apart.