What makes this site quietly remarkable is not the kiln itself, though a horseshoe-shaped enclosure of that age is unusual enough, but the three pits dug around it, each containing fragments of saddle querns that had been deliberately broken before being placed there. A saddle quern is a simple grinding stone, worked by hand to mill grain; breaking one and burying it suggests an act of intention rather than disposal. The archaeologists who uncovered the site interpreted these deposits as votive offerings, the kind of deliberate, symbolic gesture that blurs the line between everyday labour and something more like ceremony.

The excavation ran from 2 to 14 May 2002, carried out by hand as part of the archaeological resolution required by the N11 Newtownmountkennedy to Ballynabarny Road Scheme. The kiln itself occupied roughly ten square metres, cut into an irregular oval hollow on the hillside, with a tapered projection pointing east-south-east, the direction a flue or draught channel would typically face to draw air through the fire. Its fill contained thin layers of charcoal-rich and fire-reddened soil, along with the remains of a collapsed clay-bonded stone structure that had once sat above it. Sherds of pottery came from both the kiln feature and the base of the surrounding ditch. Among the charcoal recovered were pieces large enough to retain toolmarks, small physical signatures left by whoever cut and worked the fuel wood, connecting the site to specific human hands across several millennia. A second area nearby, designated Site 4, yielded lazy-beds and field boundaries of more recent date, along with a single pit of probable prehistoric origin, though no artefacts were found there.