What emerged from the ground in 2003 was not a monument or a burial, but something quieter and in many ways more compelling: the residue of people simply living, moving, and returning across millennia.

The excavation, carried out ahead of the N8 Rathcormac-Fermoy Bypass, identified 65 features of archaeological significance, among them stake-holes and post-holes, oxidised clay spreads, pits, and three hearths. One of those hearths produced a radiocarbon date of 6250 to 6040 BC, placing it firmly in the Mesolithic period, when Ireland's earliest inhabitants were hunter-gatherers working the landscape with small, precisely shaped flint tools. Two such tools, known as microliths, were recovered from the fill of one of the pits, though their context is complicated: the pit itself dated to 3090 to 2580 BC, a Neolithic horizon, suggesting the microliths had been moved or disturbed and redeposited long after their original use. The remaining two hearths dated to 2140 to 1870 BC and 1870 to 1520 BC respectively, ranges close enough that the excavating archaeologist O'Neill suggested one hearth may simply have been replaced by the other as the earlier one fell out of use. Three pits near the northern end of the excavation area held a substantial quantity of Mid-Western Neolithic pottery, and flint debitage, the waste flakes left over from knapping stone tools, turned up across the site. Two light structures were also identified, but they showed no evidence of permanent domestic life or industrial use; O'Neill concluded that the Bronze Age activity here was most likely seasonal and temporary, the trace of people passing through rather than settling.