During construction of the Bord Gáis Éireann Pipeline to the West project, archaeologists monitoring the removal of topsoil noticed fragments of burnt and unburnt human and animal bone spreading across a wide area on the plateau of a low hill, about 11 kilometres east-north-east of Moate in County Westmeath. What emerged was a place that had been used, reused, and repurposed across several thousand years, with two small corn-drying kilns sitting quietly inside what had once been a burial enclosure.

Excavations directed by Angela Wallace on behalf of Margaret Gowen & Co. Ltd identified several distinct phases of activity. The oldest was a crouched inhumation, a burial in which the body was drawn up into a foetal position, associated with sherds of a decorated vase identified by A.L. Brindley as belonging to the Early Bronze Age vase tradition, dated to between approximately 2100 and 1900 cal. BC. Encircling the hilltop plateau was a ditch with an internal diameter of around 48 metres, with an entranceway and three post-holes on the eastern side. Into this enclosed space, at some later point, two small keyhole-shaped corn-drying kilns were built. Corn-drying kilns of this type were used to dry grain before milling, typically consisting of a bowl-shaped drying chamber connected to a narrow flue through which heat was channelled. One of the kilns, designated F41, had an associated pit containing burnt animal bone, a metal strap-end, an iron knife, and a possible candle- or rushlight-holder. The second kiln, F128, was cut into material interpreted as upcast from the enclosing ditch, and an infant burial was later placed within its flue. A ringfort is clearly visible 150 metres to the north of the site, adding yet another layer to what is already a crowded landscape. The excavators drew comparisons with similar multiperiod sites at Kilpatrick in County Westmeath, where corn-drying kilns appeared alongside a bullaun stone in a cemetery context, and at Killederdadrum in County Tipperary, where a comparable mixture of funerary and agricultural evidence was recorded. The combination of the utilitarian and the sepulchral within a single enclosure is unusual, and Gneevebeg fits a pattern of Early Christian and medieval sites where the boundary between the practical and the sacred was evidently porous.