Before the dual carriageway was built, a stretch of ground at Farrankelly gave up something quietly significant: a curving arc of ditch running roughly sixty-eight metres from south-east to north-east, two slot-trenches, and a scatter of pits and postholes, the kind of subsurface pattern that archaeologists recognise as the remnants of a settlement, a place where people organised their space, drove in posts, and dug into the earth for reasons both structural and domestic.

The excavation took place in 2003, ahead of road construction, under licence 03E1550. What emerged from two of the features made the site more than a routine pre-development clearance. One of the slot-trenches, the type of narrow linear cut that typically held the timber groundsill of a wall or fence, contained a barbed and tanged arrowhead alongside prehistoric pottery. A barbed and tanged arrowhead is a flint point shaped with deliberate notches at its base to allow secure binding to a shaft, a design associated broadly with the later Neolithic and into the Bronze Age. One of the pits also yielded a fragment of prehistoric pottery. Taken together, the finds place human activity at Farrankelly in a period thousands of years before any road was planned through the area, and the curving ditch suggests something more organised than a passing camp. The site was published by Molloy in 2006.

There is nothing to see at Farrankelly today. The carriageway covers the ground where the ditch curved and the postholes once held timber upright. The interest lies not in visiting but in the knowledge that road-building, so often the enemy of archaeological survival, was in this case preceded by the careful work that brought these fragments to light before they were sealed permanently beneath the surface.