The site sits at around 140 metres above sea level, looking out over a wide spread of marshy ground to the north-east and east, with the ground falling sharply northward to a fast-flowing stream. It is the kind of elevated, well-drained position that would have made practical sense for anyone processing grain in bulk.

The kilns themselves were revealed during a Phase 2 excavation carried out by Tori McMorran for Eachtra Archaeological Projects in 2007, when roadworks along the N7 Castletown to Nenagh national road scheme exposed the site. All fifteen are earth-cut and unlined, shaped roughly like a figure-of-eight or dumbbell, a form that reflects their function: one end served as the firing chamber, sunk deeper into the ground, while the other provided the drying floor above. A corn-drying kiln of this type worked by drawing heat from a small fire up through the narrowed waist of the shape and across the grain laid out to dry, allowing farmers to process damp harvests before storage. Some of the kilns appear to have been associated with structural remains, and open areas around them may have been set aside for other stages of cereal processing. At some later point, deep wide ditches were cut across parts of the site to enclose certain areas, truncating a number of the kilns in the process. Whether the kilns were still in use when the ditches were dug, or had already fallen out of use by then, remains unclear. What is clear is that the enclosure was laid out with some awareness of where the kilns sat, since none appear within the central enclosed area and only a few were cut by the ditches from the outside edge. A final, later phase added a massive ditch forming a subrectangular moated site, a type of enclosure associated in Ireland with medieval settlement and sometimes with manorial or higher-status occupation, layering yet another period of activity over everything that came before.