During the construction, when workers cut trenches into the ground, they found that people had been living on this same patch of land long before anyone thought to put a church nearby. The site sits on what appears to be a naturally occurring raised platform, the kind of low elevated ground that would have appealed to earlier inhabitants for obvious practical reasons, and it turned out to be layered with the quiet evidence of domestic life.

The material uncovered in those construction trenches was modest but telling. There were hearths, quantities of animal bones, and sea shells, suggesting people who ate what the land and coastline provided. Alongside these were a bone spindle-whorl, used in hand-spinning thread, and a bone pin, the sort of small personal object that tends to anchor an archaeological find firmly in the rhythms of ordinary life rather than ritual or ceremony. The site sits in close proximity to Early Christian and later medieval ecclesiastical remains at Skreen, a cluster of monuments that together suggest this small area of Sligo was occupied and meaningful across a long stretch of centuries. The 1962 finds were recorded in the National Museum of Ireland's topographical files and noted by A. T. Lucas in 1964.