But before the ground was broken for that complex in 1999, excavations at Castleview turned up the remnants of a process that would have been familiar to farmers across early Ireland: the drying of grain before milling or storage. What came to light was a corn-drying kiln, a type of stone-lined structure used to apply controlled heat to harvested grain, driving out moisture in the damp Irish climate and preventing spoilage. This particular example survived as a linear stone-lined channel, roughly 4.2 metres long and just over a metre wide, its base and walls scorched by repeated firing.

The excavator, McCarthy, interpreted the channel as a probable kiln flue, the passage through which hot air would have been drawn to dry the grain above. The feature was divided internally by a row of stones running east to west, and its fill told a clear story of intense use: silt, heat-shattered stones, and long stems of burnt wood. Two pits cut into the base added further detail. The western pit, rectangular with straight sides, was packed with charcoal and heat-fractured material. The smaller eastern pit, barely 30 centimetres across, held sand, pebbles, and small stones, suggesting a slightly different function within the same structure. What made the site particularly significant was the company the kiln kept. Excavations in the immediate vicinity also uncovered a second similar feature, an early medieval possible corn-drying kiln, and a Bronze Age fulacht fia, a type of burnt mound associated with cooking or industrial heating that predates the medieval period by well over a thousand years. Taken together, this small patch of Little Island preserves overlapping layers of activity spanning millennia, all of it now buried beneath car parks and warehouse units.