When excavations were carried out along Station Road in Portmarnock, the ground yielded not a single dramatic monument but something arguably more revealing: the everyday bones of a later medieval settlement, measuring roughly 50 to 70 metres north to south and 110 metres east to west, laid out in six orderly property plots that spoke to the organised, workaday life of people whose names have not survived.

The plots were defined by linear ditches and divided internally into tofts and crofts, a common arrangement in medieval settlements where the toft was the area immediately around the house and yard, and the croft was the cultivated or working land behind it. In practical terms, archaeologists could read the social and economic rhythms of each household from what remained. Plot 4, measuring 15 metres wide and 55 metres long, contained a substantial well pit, 5.4 metres by 3 metres and 2 metres deep, positioned towards the front of the toft. The waterlogged conditions at the base of the pit preserved organic material that rarely survives: grass, twigs, fragments of leather shoe, and part of a wooden bowl. A hazel twig recovered from the fill was radiocarbon dated to between AD 1491 and 1642. Plot 5 was dominated by a large terraced yard area of 16 by 12 metres, with a wide metalled laneway, 5 metres across, running to the rear through the croft. Plot 6, the westernmost, showed evidence of a metalled surface, gullies, and pits, with the laneway continuing through its croft as well. Radiocarbon analysis across the site suggests the main period of occupation fell in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period of considerable upheaval in Irish landholding and settlement.

The site lies along Station Road in Portmarnock, a coastal village north of Dublin now absorbed into the commuter belt. There is nothing to mark the excavation on the ground today; the finds and records are the trace rather than any visible remains. The excavation was carried out under licence number 08E0376, and the published report by Moriarty (2009) is the principal reference for anyone wanting to follow the detail. What remains quietly striking is that the western plots could not be fully investigated because their northern ends ran beneath the existing road itself, meaning a portion of the settlement, probably including the buildings that would have stood at the top of the tofts, remains unexcavated beneath the tarmac.