The remains, uncovered during groundwork monitoring along the Ballynacarriga access road section of the N25 Youghal Bypass in 2001, are modest to the point of near-invisibility: an oval patch of heat-reddened earth, roughly four metres by two, with the ghost of a central flue channel still legible in the soil. Yet the sheer ordinariness of the find is part of what makes it interesting. This was not a monument or a burial; it was infrastructure, the agricultural equivalent of a barn or a threshing floor.

A corn-drying kiln of this type was a practical necessity in the damp Irish climate, used to dry harvested grain before it could be ground or stored. The basic form involves a flue, essentially a narrow channel through which heat was drawn from a fire at one end, and a drying floor above it, sometimes supported by a timber frame. At Ballynacarriga, the flue contained fills of charcoal-flecked, stony silty clay, and a cluster of post-holes around the oxidised area suggested the remains of just such a timber superstructure. A radiocarbon date taken from charcoal in the flue fill placed the kiln's use somewhere between cal. AD 650 and 890, placing it firmly in the early medieval period, an era when small farming communities across Ireland were processing grain in exactly this way. The excavation was carried out as part of standard archaeological monitoring ahead of road construction, and the site was recorded by the excavator Noonan before the bypass works continued over it.