The ground was flat and unremarkable. Then archaeologists moved in ahead of the construction work and found, just below the surface, the remains of a medieval settlement that had been entirely invisible for centuries, a moated site whose ditches and structures had been smoothed away by time and tillage until nothing remained above ground to hint at what lay beneath.

Excavations carried out in 1981 and 1982, ahead of the Cork-Dublin gas pipeline, uncovered four internal structures within the moated enclosure. A moated site, in the medieval Irish context, typically consisted of a raised platform surrounded by a water-filled or wet ditch, used by settlers, often of Anglo-Norman origin, as a form of defended farmstead. At Ballyveelish, three buildings were identified in the eastern section and a possible fourth to the west. The most clearly defined of these, designated Structure A, was interpreted as a house measuring roughly 4.25 metres north to south and 4.5 metres east to west. Its walls had been constructed using wattle, a technique involving woven branches or rods, and on three sides the house was enclosed by the lower courses of a stone wall, likely the remnant of a yard or small enclosure. Finds recovered from the site, along with animal bones, pointed to occupation during the thirteenth or fourteenth century, and the relatively small quantity of material suggested the site may have been in use for only a short period before it was abandoned and forgotten.