Alongside the ruins of Kilpatrick Church, excavations in 1980 uncovered a corn-drying kiln of the keyhole type, a design common in early medieval Ireland in which grain was spread above a flue shaped roughly like the eye of a key, allowing heat and smoke to rise evenly through the crop. The kiln contained substantial deposits of grain and burned material, suggesting it had been in active use before whatever event sealed it beneath the ground.

The excavations were conducted by D. L. Swan, who opened a small cutting to the north of the church ruins and immediately encountered far more than foundation stones. In a trench measuring just 2.5 by 5 metres, the remains of over 40 individuals came to light at less than 40 centimetres below the surface, 32 of them infants and young children. The burials were layered between a construction phase and a later collapse, both associated with a rebuilding and eventual ruin of the church itself. Deeper still, Swan found enigmatic features cutting into the boulder clay, including a deep trench and postholes up to 60 centimetres in diameter, suggesting a large circular structure once stood in the western sector of the site. Among the smaller finds were bone pins, fragments of pottery, a copper alloy strip, and a tiny copper alloy bird mounted on a ribbed tang, an object whose closest parallel, Swan noted, comes from excavations at Whitby in Yorkshire. Perhaps most evocative was a large iron key found carefully concealed in an area of disturbed ground, almost certainly the key to the church itself, dated tentatively to the 15th or 16th century. The graveyard boundary wall at the north-east still follows the curve of an earlier early Christian ecclesiastical enclosure, a faint arc in the stonework that quietly marks a much older sacred perimeter. St Patrick's Well, also known as Scardan Well, lies 660 metres to the east.