A small excavation, carried out under licence in 1993, turned up a layer of heavy organic silt packed with butchered bone, leather scraps, twigs, and sphagnum moss, the kind of waterlogged, airless deposit that preserves organic material with unsettling fidelity. The find was identified as a midden, essentially a rubbish dump, and dated to the medieval or early post-medieval period.

A midden of this kind accumulates slowly, built up from the everyday debris of households or tradespeople who had no other means of disposal. The presence of butchered bone suggests food preparation or perhaps a butcher's trade nearby; the leather points to cobbling or working hides; the sphagnum, a type of bog moss with natural absorbent properties, was commonly used as a packing material or even a primitive wound dressing. Together, the contents sketch a faint outline of working life in a small Irish town sometime between the late medieval period and the early modern era. The site sits within the Burgagery-Lands, a term referring to the plots of land historically attached to burgage tenure, the system by which residents of a medieval borough held their property in exchange for a fixed rent and certain civic obligations. That the rubbish of such a community should survive in a back garden, essentially intact, is the quiet strangeness of urban archaeology.