The site turned out to be not one settlement but several, layered across time, with the earliest activity reaching back to the Beaker period of the Late Neolithic, somewhere around 2300 to 2200 BC. Beaker people are named for their distinctive pottery vessels, typically fine-walled and carefully made, found across Atlantic Europe in this era. At Curraheen, over forty sherds from at least three such vessels, two fine and one domestic, were recovered from a single pit, along with flint debitage, a chert thumbnail scraper, and charred seeds. Charcoal from the same pit returned a radiocarbon date of 2580 to 2200 BC, placing these objects among the earliest datable evidence of settlement in this part of Cork.

The second and more structurally complex phase of occupation belongs to the early medieval period, somewhere between AD 400 and 900. The most substantial remains were two adjacent ditches, or fosses, enclosing separate but linked areas. The larger enclosure held over a hundred features, including post-holes, stake-holes, pits, at least one hearth, and two linear anomalies whose purpose remains unclear. In the north-eastern quadrant of this enclosure, excavators identified an oval post-and-wattle house, a construction method common in early medieval Ireland in which upright posts are woven with flexible rods to form walls, measuring roughly eight metres east to west and six metres north to south. A possible outhouse or storage unit was also identified nearby. The smaller, adjacent enclosure, with only three interior features, appears to have served as an animal compound. Together, the two enclosures suggest the layout of a ringfort, the enclosed farmstead type that was the standard unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, though radiocarbon dating indicated the site was not occupied for a particularly long period. Scattered finds also pointed to activity during the Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age, and medieval periods, making Curraheen something of a palimpsest, a landscape written over and over by different communities across the millennia.