The site occupies a space only about 55 metres east to west and 25 metres wide, yet within that compact footprint, archaeologists found evidence of people cooking, building, and going about their daily business across at least three distinct periods of prehistory and early history.

Excavations carried out between February and May 2010, led by Yvonne Whitty and involving additional testing by Fintan Walsh, revealed three broad phases of activity. The earliest and most substantial belongs to the early Neolithic, a period roughly six thousand years ago when farming communities were first establishing themselves across Ireland. Two structures, probably houses, were identified through the patterns of post-holes and stake-holes left in the ground; post-holes are the ghost-impressions of upright timbers, visible in the soil long after the wood itself has rotted away. One structure had a foundation slot-trench, a narrow dug channel into which a wall or sill beam would have been set, while the other lacked this feature entirely, suggesting the two buildings may have been constructed in quite different ways. Neither structure survived completely within the excavated area, and both are thought to extend further to the north. Scattered pits, hearths, and spreads to the south of the structures contained early Neolithic pottery and worked flints, interpreted as the debris of ordinary domestic activity. Later, a single pit belonging to the early or middle Bronze Age was found between the two structures, and a hearth towards the south-west of the site dates to the late Iron Age or early medieval period, indicating that people continued to make use of this raised ground long after the Neolithic houses had disappeared. Centuries of ploughing had worn many of these features down considerably, leaving only their shallowest traces, and a geophysical survey that had suggested the presence of a substantial linear feature in a neighbouring area of the site proved, on testing, to be a false lead produced by natural deposits of sand, gravel, and stone in the subsoil. The site also sits close to a previously identified Bronze Age site roughly 90 to 125 metres to the north-north-east, and it is possible the two formed part of a larger prehistoric landscape that has only been partially glimpsed through the narrow window opened by road construction.